Ultimate Hate
by thegreymoon
Summary: It has been over twenty years since Lee parted ways with Kazuya. Now, their paths are about to cross again, forcing them to learn how to live and work with each other once more. WARNINGS: Incest, violence, language, angst. PAIRING: Kazuya/Lee
1. Intrusion I

Title: Ultimate Hate 01/?

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R for now, NC-17 overall

Warnings: Nothing much for this chapter because it is only the beginning, but the overall story will include: incest, graphic violence, graphic sexual scenes between two men, non-consensual sexual situations, nasty language, major angst and probably a great deal of other disturbing stuff that I didn't think of to mention here.

Author's note: I have finally given in to my nasty little urges to write Tekken m/m!

Lee is so absolutely hot and beautiful and Kazuya is... well just absolutely hot (and both of them are utterly evil), so I feel that the fandom (and this pairing in particular), are in definite need of more yaoi love!

Part One

Lee woke up to a wet nose nudging his face.

He did not need to hear the distressed meow from his white Persian to know that something was wrong. Awake at last, he was very aware of his surroundings. With a shudder, he remembered the oppressive weight that had been bearing down on his sleep, fighting to keep him unconscious while his every instinct struggled against it. He strove to free himself from the alien suggestion coaxing him to remain immersed in the uncomprehending darkness and he felt it withdraw at once— this foreign will that was trying to manipulate him. Its irritation at being thwarted was tangible and the disapproving hiss almost audible in his mind, but the imminent sense of danger remained very strong and Lee was no fool to ignore his instinct. Something powerful, something dangerous was invading his privacy. Something that was undoubtedly evil.

"Kazuya," he murmured hatefully under his breath, recalling the sickeningly familiar feel of the supernatural aura too clearly to mistake it for a figment of his imagination. It felt like his brother, yet… it was not. This invading presence wasn't him at all and Lee knew it at once. It was old. It was too powerful and too developed— too controlled for Kazuya's violent temper, for his passion and utter lack of restraint. This one was huge. It was wise and deep, like the monstrous roots of a tree that had survived for centuries in the same spot, growing strong, wizened and calm in the midst of all its ancient power and self-sufficiency. It was almost what he would have expected Heihachi to feel like, if he had ever wielded the Devil Gene, but it was still different, somehow more… ancient. Less volatile and more in control.

"Come here, sweetheart," he whispered, picking up his frightened pet and scratching behind its ears to calm it down. Animals could sense evil and this one had done so, confirming his fears. On soundless feet, he carried it to a small cage and stuffed it inside, ignoring the hissing and the bared teeth. The cat was obviously stressed from being caged when it's every instinct was telling it to run. Lee expected the worst and he pulled the loaded gun from under his pillow, where he always kept it as a precaution. The very few people that had gotten close enough to him over the years to know about it had told him that he was paranoid. That he should seek therapy.

He grinned bitterly. None of them were alive any longer.

Carefully, soundlessly, he picked up the cage and made his way out of the bedroom, without turning on the lights. He sat it down near a hidden trap door in the wall and proceeded further down the dark hallway— towards the living room— with his gun cocked and ready to fire, even though he knew that if he found what he was expecting, the ammunition would do him no good.

He was not mistaken.

The creature sitting there was so monstrous and hateful to his eyes that he could not even bring himself to call it a man. It sprawled on his clean, white sofa; powerful, potent and utterly male. It seeped malice all around and radiated an aura of smug confidence and superiority. Even though it had been discovered, it still waited calmly for him to approach, because it knew that it could not be outmatched.

Nauseous, Lee raised his gun towards it and aimed. "Jinpachi Mishima," he growled.

"I see that you know who I am," the rumbling laughter vibrated through the air. The sound of it was threaded with something hellish and unearthly, unlike anything that a human throat could produce. The bare flesh of his massive chest was streaked by fiery red as if his skin had broken and exposed the fire that he carried underneath— like molten, seething lava crawling through the cracks of shattered earth.

"It is hard not to recall your somewhat unique… qualities," Lee answered, remembering the mayhem that this being was capable of— the terrible power it wielded and the chaos it had wreaked at the Tournament. His mind raced. As powerful a fighter as he was, he knew that he was way out of his league when faced with such a menace. "I have seen you before."

Jinpachi's fiery eyes flicked in amusement at the gun in Lee's hand and he grinned. "What?" he rumbled mockingly. "Do you plan to kill me with that?"

Lee smiled pleasantly, but his dark eyes remained sharp and ice cold. "I most certainly intend to try," he said and Jinpachi rose to his feet, stalking towards him with slow predatory steps.

"I thought that you were a fighter," he said. "I thought you had more honour and yet you stand there and threaten me with bullets when I am unarmed. How disappointing! I never would have taken you for such a coward."

"We are not at a tournament now," Lee replied, circling the table as Jinpachi approached him, maintaining the same distance between them and waiting to see what he was up to. He would not fire the gun before he was desperate, because he knew it would do him no good. Weapon or not, he was not the one in control here and he hated to give Jinpachi a chance to prove just how futile his stand against him was. "This is my home and you are trespassing, therefore I am entitled to threaten you in any way that I see fit. Also, when you deign to fight other men as a man yourself and not as an entity of hell itself, then you can speak to me of cowardice. Courage and foolishness do not amount to the same."

Jinpachi grinned, his mouth splitting under his spiked moustache to reveal a jaw full of strong, frightening teeth. The halo of power shimmered around him and he seemed to diminish somehow when the streaks of living fire withdrew from his flesh. The abnormal red in his gaze died down to barely an ember and gave his eyes back their natural brown. He seemed almost human— the Devil Gene shifting and hiding as if behind a veil— but the demonic aura couldn't be concealed and Lee sensed it, lurking just out of sight to his mortal eyes. He could still smell the fire and mayhem that lingered in the earthly, musky scent of the creature's body and he tasted it at the back of his throat when he was forced to breathe it in.

"There," Jinpachi said, spreading his arms in a gesture of good will. "Do I look better now?"

"Funny," Lee replied, not lowering his guard for an inch. "A minute ago I'd have sworn that you cannot get any uglier."

"Now, now," Jinpachi mocked. "That's a rude way to treat a guest."

"A guest?" Lee said, one of his elegant eyebrows arching at the word. "Is that what you are?"

"What do you think I am?"

"A threat."

Jinpachi laughed. "I did not come to threaten you, beauty," he said and his mirth melted into that terrible smile which made him look anything but beguiling. "No, I did not come to threaten you at all."

"Then why did you come?" Lee growled, his eyes stealthily covering the room, the windows, the doors, the exits. All of them were secure. How the hell did this demon get in without triggering his alarms? There was no way in. Or out.

"I thought it was time that you and I got to know each other a little better," Jinpachi said in mock affection. "We are family, after all."

"We are nothing of the kind." Lee's eyes narrowed. "And even if we were, I am still only upholding the oldest of the Mishima traditions."

"Oh?"

"Welcoming relatives at gunpoint."

"Cute," Jinpachi grinned nastily. "Very cute. But I am not here as your enemy."

"Then why are you here?"

"I have a proposition to make."

"A proposition?"

"One that would be to your benefit, if you were to listen."

"I am listening," Lee smiled pleasantly, but he still did not lower his gun. Jinpachi's eyes narrowed in irritation, but he made no outward sign of aggression, apparently deciding for patience. Obviously, he wanted something.

"You know who I am," he started. "You know what I am."

"I can certainly guess," Lee replied.

"I have sired a line of monsters," Jinpachi continued. "They have destroyed me. They have disgraced my name. They have trampled over everything that the Mishima household once stood for! All that I had ever strived to accomplish is now obliterated. My bloodline has caused enough evil in this world."

"Indeed," Lee said blandly. Understatement did not even begin to cover Jinpachi's words.

"I want to make amends," Jinpachi said. "I want to undo my mistakes and put things right once more."

"Well, good luck in your noble endeavour," Lee said indifferently. "I just don't see what any of this has to do with me."

"I want them dead," Jinpachi said. "I want to kill them all! My son, his son and the son of his son. Men of their kind do not deserve to live, with their base, dishonest ambitions! I will rid the world of the Devil Gene!"

"Good for you!" Lee said dryly. "But I am forced to repeat myself— what has any of this got to do with me?"

"You can help me."

"Can I?"

"You are close to them," Jinpachi said. "I need you to set my traps."

"Close to them?" Lee said incredulously, nearly laughing at his words. "I am sorry to disappoint you, demon, but your information is decades behind time! Heihachi disowned me years ago as both his son and heir, under the threat of death if I should ever return to Japan. Which, I might add, is the best thing the evil son of a bitch ever did for me! I haven't had any contact with him since."

"I'm not talking about Heihachi," Jinpachi said seriously, none of Lee's bitter humour showing in his dark, angry eyes. "I'll deal with my son easily enough. I know who he is. I know where he is. He will die by my hand for his treason, have no doubt about that!"

"Then what the hell do you want from me?"

"I need you for Kazuya." Jinpachi replied. "I need you to lure him out of his lair, because I doubt that he will come out of hiding for anyone else."

"Kazuya?" Lee said, the mention of the name stabbing through his chest in a flash of vivid pain as if it had only been a day and not over twenty years since they had hurt each other… since they had both betrayed their alliance. Over twenty years since Kazuya had died, because Lee had not been there for him, when he should have stood by his side.

Jinpachi grinned, his nostrils flaring as he caught the scent of his inner turmoil.

"You do know that he is alive, don't you, child?" he said maliciously. "You are brothers, after all."


	2. Intrusion II

Title: Ultimate Hate 02/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Violence.

Part Two

"I know he's alive," Lee said bitterly. The fucking bastard.

The shock of seeing his brother at the Iron Fist tournament had almost been more than he could bear. Kazuya had changed, yet he was still very much the same; monstrous, but magnificent. He was terrible and powerful, both repellent and alluring.

Alive, after all the time Lee had spent grieving for him. Feeling guilty for his death.

He had wavered for decades on the edge between love and hate, torturing himself for what he had and hadn't done. Immersed in sorrow, he had spent a long time missing him, wanting him, wishing he could just go back in time and do things differently. Wishing that Kazuya could live, so that maybe, just maybe they could also have a second chance at the love they had betrayed, until he had finally realized, after so many years spent apart, that his brother had never loved him at all.

If Kazuya had ever harboured any affection for him whatsoever, he would never have done this to him. He would not have let him grieve in vain for so long. It had all been just an illusion his mind had conjured so that he could go on living after such a major heartbreak. It was the only love he had allowed himself to feel in his entire adult life and knowing that it had all been a lie had opened up wounds that should by all rights have killed him.

In spite of knowing him so well, Lee had never realised that Kazuya could be so cruel. Not to him, not after everything that they had been to each other.

Jinpachi closed his eyes, his eyeballs shuddering behind his lids in sheer ecstasy. He breathed in deeply, as if trying to catch an elusive scent.

"So much anger," he whispered. "So much pain. I can sense your hate. I can smell it, because it is so fragrant, potent and raw. It is so strong, it overwhelms me."

Lee winced from his words and backed away, uneasy that this creature could read him so easily.

Jinpachi opened his eyes as if awaking from a trance and the deep red resurfaced there. He fixed Lee with a dangerous, curious glare.

"Strange," he said. "I had not expected you to be capable of such deep emotion. He told me that you were treacherous. That you were calculating and cold, yet I find that you are nothing of the kind. He told me that all you ever wanted was the control of Zaibatsu, that you had lied to him and betrayed him to get the power that you craved! Could it be that he misjudged you, just like I had misjudged him?"

"He?" Lee said, disturbed by the speech more than he dared to let show. "Kazuya, you mean?"

"Yes," Jinpachi said. "He came to me when I called, just like I thought that he would. He seemed… almost happy to see me. He seemed to long for companionship. He was angry, full of hate, yet so miserable and alone, it almost broke my heart."

"And yet you want him dead?" Lee said incredulously, having a hard time following the creature's logic. "How does that make sense?"

"It was my pity for him that had stayed my hand," Jinpachi said. "I hesitated when I should have struck him down and he escaped me. I underestimated his intelligence and his strength. He has grown. He has become formidable and clever. He has become powerful. Not so easy to destroy as I anticipated and while he loved me once, trusted me, even, he no longer does so now. I lost my chance of catching him unawares."

"I can't imagine why," Lee said in disdain.

"Don't judge me," Jinpachi said. "Don't you dare judge me! I love my grandson. I always have. The hatred he feels for me now is scalding my soul, but I cannot let him live. He has become too strong an evil to deserve it. He is a plague. He is a scourge. He is a threat to all mankind!"

"If it isn't the proverbial pot calling the kettle black," Lee mocked. "Who the hell made you the authority on who gets to live and who doesn't?"

"Is that concern for Kazuya that I sense in your words?" Jinpachi said, his eyes flaring with sudden surprise. "A long forgotten remnant of loyalty, perhaps? Could it be that you too loved him once, after all?"

"That is none of your business," Lee said icily and Jinpachi laughed.

"My, my," he said. "He has misjudged you indeed, which is a shame. Such a shame. Though I like you better like this, you would have suited my purpose far better if it had been just a simple thirst for power driving you, like my misguided offspring seems to believe. Such a pity that things between us have to turn ugly now, when our alliance would have been so… mutually beneficial."

Lee flushed angrily, deeply injured by the creature's words.

"Do not presume that you know anything about me, monster," he said coldly, but his eyes were bright and hateful as he looked straight at him. "You have offended me. You have belittled me. You have threatened me and invaded my privacy, so the only thing that could possibly benefit us both at this point, would be if you left my house at one."

"You are throwing me out?" Jinpachi said in amusement, still circling him. Lee's eyes narrowed and his hand flexed around his weapon, testing the firmness of his grip as the creature seemed ready to pounce.

"I am asking you politely," he replied. "Which is more than you deserve, considering that I never even invited you in."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I shall become less polite, but you will leave anyway."

Jinpachi glared at him with menace, dropping his pleasant act.

"Do not think for a moment, you foreign, unwelcome, unwanted cub, that you hold the cards here," he said. "You will aid me, whether you will it or not."

"Years ago," Lee whispered angrily, "I promised myself that I shall not be cowed, nor threatened by a Mishima ever again! I shall honour that promise. You have no power over me!"

Jinpachi's eyes narrowed and he snarled. Almost with no warning, he lunged, jumping over the table that separated them, smoothly, weightlessly, like an animal leaps, and Lee backed away, firing his weapon. The bullets discharged, one after another without a pause, and Jinpachi's arm moved faster than eye could follow, catching them all in the palm of his large, wizened hand, until the gun clicked emptily and Lee had to stop, lowering it in disbelief.

Grinning, Jinpachi opened his fingers one by one to reveal a ragged lump of molten, smouldering lead.

"You think that your puny weapons can kill me, child?" he growled. "For three hundred years I have walked this earth and faced men far more powerful, more intelligent than you will ever be, and let me tell you, I have yet to meet my match!"

Horrified, Lee stared as the red fire resurfaced in Jinpachi's eyes and the creature opened his mouth in a bellow of sheer rage that sent a quiver through the entire house, as if a small earthquake had exploded under its foundations. He almost failed to evade him as he pounced forward, hunting him as if he was prey.

"Don't worry," Jinpachi said, his voice taking on the unearthly, shuddering quality once more. "I shall not hurt you… a lot. I need you alive, so that Kazuya will come. He will not risk you harm."

Lee laughed.

"Kazuya will not come for me!" he said bitterly, flexing his fists in a guarded position, anticipating attack. "You can take me, you can hurt me and he will do nothing to stop you! Kazuya hates me and cares only if I live so that he can kill me himself!"

"You are his mate, you foolish child," Jinpachi said. "He may hate you, but he could never want you dead! Without you, he would be alone for all eternity."

He moved fast, he struck hard and Lee staggered back as he blocked the attack and swivelled out of the way of the next one.

"His mate?" he said incredulously. "Where did you come from, old man? We are not animals to _mate_! And even if we had been less than human on numerous occasions, we were never lovers in any sense of the word."

Agitated, Jinpachi spun around, eyeing him unpleasantly, waiting for an opening.

"Ah, but that is not true, is it?" he said. "His power clings all over you. It would not have happened if you had not at least once willingly accepted him into your arms, into your bed. He chose you to share his immortality and you opened up both your body and your soul for him to enter and make his home deep within you. With your acceptance, his power spilled into your flesh, to always keep you young, always beautiful, for as long as he lives. A potential eternity of companionship. A bond that a Devil makes only once. A bond that can never be broken, even in death."

Lee shivered.

"What are you talking about?" he said, the horror of Jinpachi's words chilling him to the bone. Was that the answer to years of questions that he did not even know how to ask? Faced with it, Lee suddenly realised that he did not want to find out.

"You did not know?" Jinpachi said, amused. "But that can't be! Surely, you must have noticed that you have not aged a day since you first lay with him! At the age of almost half a century, you do not look a day over the twenty-something that you must have been then, when the bond between you was forged."

"No," Lee said in helpless denial, backing away from his speech as if from a physical threat.

"Surely, you must have seen all physical injury vanish from your flesh without even leaving a mark, no matter how severe it was!" Jinpachi continued. "You are faster, you are stronger than a man should, or could ever be! You are not plagued by ailments and disease. You are no longer a mortal at all! You must know this. Could it be that you have never wondered why?"

Lee stared at him, his face ashen and white. Oh, he had wondered! Of course, he had wondered! He had spent millions upon millions in wealth over many years in deeply buried, secret laboratories he had funded and then destroyed, along with the doctors that had worked there, to find an answer to that terrifying question.

He had pulled himself from public view and human company when he had first became aware of it, terrified that somebody else would notice it too. He had survived experiences he should not have lived through. He had seen his body recover from injuries it should not have been able to endure. He had been afraid, very afraid of this malediction lingering within him for a very long time.

"I don't believe you," he said in a horrified whisper. "You lie, demon. You lie to confuse me and make me weak!"

Jinpachi roared and lunged forward, striking at him with all the supernatural power of his being. Lee was hit by the aura. The shield of his unearthly power knocked him back, making him strike his head painfully against the wall. Before he could recover, a fist with the strength of a stone hammer slammed into his jaw, nearly making him black out. A large, powerful hand tightened around his neck, choking him and keeping him in place.

"You _are_ weak, you insolent pup," Jinpachi sneered against his cheek, the heat of his hot, rancid breath burning over Lee's face. "You always were, or Heihachi would never have taken you in as one of his own! Heihachi is a coward and he would have been too afraid of the sin that he himself had perpetrated, to raise a son worthy of my name!"

Choking, Lee struggled in a futile effort to dislodge him and Jinpachi licked a line over his cheek, as if wanting to taste his skin. Lee whimpered and jerked away, disgusted by the touch.

"Heihachi knows what one's children are capable of," Jinpachi said thoughtfully, speaking more to himself than anyone else. "He would never have raised something that he thought he would not be able to control and Kazuya learned that the hard way, when he was condemned to what for anyone else would have been certain death, so that his father could avoid the same treason that he himself was guilty of! But there is justice after all and so far, all of Heihachi's endeavours have failed him miserably!"


	3. Intrusion III

Title: Ultimate Hate 03/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee and uh… I guess slight Jinpachi/Lee here too… please don't kill me, people! *runs like hell*

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Violence, mostly. Tiny, tiny little non-consensual sexual situation, but nothing that Lee can't handle… yet! Yes, everyone, I am a pervert and yes, I know, Jinpachi would probably never do something like this in the canon Tekkenverse (he is so honourable and wise and full of good intentions, like destroying all existence), but I just couldn't help myself! :P

Part Three

Lee gasped, struggling to draw enough breath. He clawed at the hand holding him in place, vainly trying to dislodge it. Jinpachi leaned forward and buried his face in the silky mass of his bright, beautiful hair, breathing in deeply the clean scent of it and his entire hard, mighty body shuddered from a profound, barely suppressed need.

"Treacherous you may be," Jinpachi murmured, drawing his lips over the side of Lee face and pressing them against his temple in what may have almost been a kiss, "but I see why Kazuya still loves you, even though you denied both him and the alliance you had. I see why he wants you, because you are so very pretty, so fragrant and soft. So very delicious, that I'd almost be tempted to keep you for myself and personally experience the delight of taming your vicious wilfulness. The prize of having you tremble in submission after a bitter struggle to resist must surely be profound; a reward almost worthy the terrible risk of having you at all, because even knowing that you are a double edged sword, I still find that it so very easy for a man to lose himself in the sheer luxury of exquisite beauty!"

His thick, hot tongue moved like a fat slug over the side of Lee's face, tracing wet patterns on his skin, and Lee convulsed in his hold, desperately trying to turn away from the unwanted, lecherous caress. Held tight in a choking grip a foot above the ground, pressed tight against the wall with no leverage to kick out, Lee felt the dark edges of unconsciousness creeping up upon him as his reeling mind struggled, seeking for a way to escape. The hard length of Jinpachi's arousal was large, urgent and threatening against him and the heat of him reeked of violence and lust.

"_Think!"_ His mind screamed in revulsion. He had to think to get out of this, because struggling against it was getting him nowhere, outmatched as he was in strength and sheer physical prowess against this ancient, terrible being. Desperate, he was desperate and he went limp in the iron grasp, fighting to preserve the last shred of clarity in his urgent need for oxygen.

Seconds, that was all he had before he blacked out and he raced against himself as he waited for his plan to kick in, even though he had no time to wait, but it worked.

Amazingly, at the last moment, it worked. On the very edge of darkness, Jinpachi put him down, letting his feet touch the ground. He relaxed his grip a fraction, letting him breathe, but kept his hand tight around his throat as a warning and a precaution and Lee gasped, greedily sucking in the air that he was deprived of. For a moment, he was almost too distracted to care as Jinpachi leaned over him, the unnatural heat of his breath washing all over his face as he pressed down on his soft, parted lips, the thick tongue wet and demanding while it sought its entrance.

"No!" Lee cried in helpless disgust. He turned his head and brought up his hands to strike and push him away, but he may as well have been trying to move a mountain, massive as the man was and infused with the supernatural strength that was running in abundance throughout the whole of his brown, wizened body. Jinpachi growled threateningly at the resistance, like an animal denied its craving, and used the little leverage he had granted to slam the smaller man hard into the wall.

Lee yelped as the back of his head hit the hard surface painfully and lost his balance for a moment. Holding him tight, Jinpachi pushed his legs apart with a large, powerful knee, pressing cruelly against his soft, vulnerable crotch. Lee gasped, but was forced to settle as Jinpachi drew close, suffocating him in his unnatural heat. Thoroughly trapped, with his awareness swimming between light and darkness from what was probably a concussion, Lee thrashed his head from side to side to avoid Jinpachi's mouth when he sought to kiss him again, vaguely aware of the sticky warmth trickling down his nape from a pool of sharp, stabbing pain.

"No!" Lee gasped once more, horrified at his own helplessness as Jinpachi caught his chin and held it fast, forcing his large thumb into his unwilling mouth. He pried his jaw open and then held it in a vice grip, to stop him from biting.

The demon tasted of fire and of ash and Lee gagged, closing his eyes against the horror of what he intended to do.

"I will taste you," Jinpachi breathed into his mouth. "I will have you. You will not resist me!"

Lee whimpered and sank down against the wall as far as the unrelenting grip would let him, which was not very much at all. The unwanted kiss consumed him, but there was no way to resist it and his entire body crawled in disgust as the violent tongue plundered his unwilling mouth, demanding his submission. Lee writhed and gagged, unable to breathe. The little air he did manage to inhale was thick with the smell of the man and it made him nauseous, bringing with it unwanted memories, images of years he had long buried under the maturity of adulthood, the sense of hopelessness and fear, of being a child in the world of adults, of being small, helpless and pretty at the mercy of grown men who were infinitely larger, stronger and more powerful.

It had been decades since he had last felt like that. Prey in the claws of a predator.

Defeated.

Weak.

"_Fuck you," _he thought in anger and in hate, bracing his hands on Jinpachi's hot, powerful chest and ceasing his struggles, relaxing for a moment into the unwanted embrace and willingly opening his mouth to allow the intruder the access it desired. Jinpachi sighed into its moist warmth and shuddered with unbearable longing, releasing his painful grip on Lee's jaw and letting his hand slide into his bright, silver hair when the soft mouth remained obedient and docile of its own accord. The grip around Lee's throat loosened into a caress as Jinpachi tipped his head back to an angle that suited him. Lee endured the touch, gathering his thoughts, his strength, testing the coordination of his body under the pain and confusion of the blow he had suffered to his head. He would get only one chance at this and he would be damned if he was going to waste it by acting prematurely.

His white, long- fingered hands moved in tentative exploration over Jinpachi's broad shoulders, almost stroking over the hot, brown skin, cautiously slipping lower down his back, careful not to make any sudden movements that would alert the hated being. Thoroughly immersed in the willingness of the kiss, Jinpachi did not react as perfectly manicured nails scratched down his sides, sneaking around his waist and Lee nearly laughed to himself, marvelling at how this seldom failed to work with men of the Mishima kind. Sometimes it really paid to be as beautiful as he was, because people never ceased to underestimate him because of it.

Lee's fingers slid slowly over the ornate sash around Jinpachi's waist and the man gasped into his mouth as he slid his thumbs just a fraction under it, touching bare skin and moving until the back of his hand finally hit what it was seeking: the handle of the short blade hanging at Jinpachi's hip.

Stealthily, Lee closed his palm around it.

Fast as a viper's strike, he drew it out with a chilling hiss and distracted as he was, Jinpachi did not react in time. With all the strength he had, Lee buried it to the hilt in his back, biting down hard at the same time and tasting thick, hot, potent blood on his tongue. Jinpachi howled in anger and drew back the fraction that Lee needed to bring up his knee and slam it viciously into his aroused groin, making him pull away and double over from the pain.

Wasting no time, he tried to escape, but screaming his hate, Jinpachi caught him. With darkness and fire exploding all around him, he twisted Lee's wrist to the point of breaking, but the younger man yelled in anger and in challenge. Pulling back as far as he could and using the grip as leverage to spin, he gathered the speed and strength he needed. In a single strike, he smacked his elbow under Jinpachi's jaw and felt the bone crack with relish.

The Devil released him and he fell. Catching himself, he rolled away in a smooth motion, landing in a graceful crouch a safe distance away and glaring with dark, narrow eyes. He spat his enemy's blood out on to the clean, white carpet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand in disgust and utter contempt.

Bursting with fire and roaring, Jinpachi lunged at him, but injured as he was and immersed in his frustrated rage, he was unfocused. Lee was expecting it, relying upon it and he dodged the attack, doing a neat back flip and landing on his feet. As Jinpachi turned, he spun and sent a high kick straight to his face, the heel of his bare foot smashing into his nose and shattering it. Jinpachi's mouth opened like an abyss of darkness as he screamed his menace.

All the windows shattered and the carpet, the curtains and the woodwork burst into violent flames.

Lee had seconds before Jinpachi caught up with him and he quickly typed the emergency code into the security system, turning on the Red Alert connected to all the offices of his huge, corporate empire. The howling siren echoed through the burning rooms and Jinpachi forced the doors Lee had shut on him open with inhuman strength. Pieces of plaster fell down around them from the disrupted ceiling and Lee pressed his hand against the ID screen, the computer identifying him and opening a tiny safe deposit box at last.

There was a shotgun inside, or at least, a high-tech piece of equipment that resembled it in its design. His people had spent a decade perfecting the technology and it was the ultimate weapon which could cause a revolution in warfare if his research was ever made public, seeing him rich beyond imagination, but Lee still wasn't sure if he hated humanity enough to inflict something like that upon them.

"Catch this, you son of a bitch," he hissed vindictively and shot just as Jinpachi broke through. A set of twin, burning, laser beams hit him straight on the chest, cracking it open and making tentacles of ink and venomous fumes spew out instead of blood.

The creature yelled, transforming into a hellish being, spurting spikes on its forearms and back, its eyes burning red and its mouth deforming itself into a hole of blackness. A fire raged on its inside as the gaping wound fought to close.

Horrified, Lee ran. On his way, he picked up his caged, hissing cat and hurrying, but not rushing, he made the final plans for his escape.

He hit the blaring red button on the wall and a trap door slid open, revealing an elevator shaft. As he waited for it to close and the elevator to descend, he glanced at Jinpachi once more, noting in horror that the being was composing itself and stalking towards him, mad from fury at being tricked and thwarted in such a way.

"I will destroy you," Jinpachi promised evenly, his voice inhuman and vibrating evil.

As the steel of the doors closed, Lee typed the final code and pressed enter with no hesitation. The elevator slid down and the house above him exploded, hopefully with his enemy still in it, but he had barely breathed a sigh of relief, when a heavy, menacing weight landed on the roof above him and a sharp, jagged spike cut through layers of steel, making the entire mechanism shake.

"Fuck," Lee cursed, getting his gun ready, but he reached the lower levels before the Devil ripped through. He ran outside, just seconds before Jinpachi finally dropped in.

Punching a red, angry button activated by his emergency code, he made another set of steel doors behind him close on Jinpachi's angry form, slowing him and giving Lee the precious seconds he needed to make his escape. All of the exits were closing and he made it through them barely in time, running as the entire complex shut down and auto- destructed behind him.

He finally reached the last trap door and climbed the ladder that led outside. He simply pushed on to the lid keeping it closed to get to the surface.

And there, a helicopter stood, ready for him.

Paranoid. For years, people had called him paranoid and for years, his paranoia had served him well.

Barefoot, dressed in light pyjama bottoms and taking only his cat with him, he climbed into the aircraft, putting on his headphones and activating the controls. The cat meowed in panic, spinning in circles in the confined space as the helicopter rose, bearing them away. Lee opened a little catch and something resembling a glove compartment yielded a small remote control, with only a single button upon it.

He took it out and clicked, as if he was simply changing the channel on what had been his life. In a second, the entire island exploded behind him. One, two, three giant explosions that buried the solid land and made the seas rise up to swallow the destruction. There would be nothing left behind. What the fire did not incinerate to ashes, the enormous waters would swallow up forever, hopefully taking Jinpachi Mishima to the bottom of the ocean with it, until the end of time.

Lee looked down fearfully, cautious of seeing a dark, winged creature following him, but there was nothing there, except for the smoke and towering flames. He had a hard time imagining any living being surviving the inferno he had caused, but Jinpachi was no ordinary creature.

Lee did not doubt that he would live and come back to haunt him again, because the problem with trying to kill a Mishima, was that no matter what you did, they just simply refused to die.


	4. Aftermath

Title: Ultimate Hate 04/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee overall , hint of Lee/OC here (sorry, guys, I didn't dare to do this to any of the canon Tekken characters, for the fear of being lynched)…

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: None.

Part Four

Lee huddled in a borrowed coat in front of the huge computer and shivered, more from the shock than because of the actual cold. Now that he was safe once more, pampered and protected in the heart of his corporate empire, he was beginning to comprehend the magnitude of what had happened and the full implications of it all were shaking him to the core.

He had lost his home, his sanctuary. His privacy had been invaded and he himself violated in a most grotesque manner, but the worst part of it all was that he hadn't seen it coming. He had almost failed to defend himself. He had almost been abducted, almost killed and the worst of all, almost raped by that hellish being. Unwanted, unbidden, the images and sensations resurfaced in his mind; him being held down and helpless, hostile lips on his skin, a forceful tongue in his mouth, the overbearing stench of the creature and the repulsive taste of it, the inhuman strength, the unbearable heat, the sheer terror and revulsion, the like of which he had not felt since he had left Heihachi's house.

Horrified, Lee closed his eyes against the memory and shuddered, as if that would somehow expunge the images from his mind. He had to remind himself that it was all over before he could regain his bearing, but he still could not bring himself to believe it and subconsciously waited for something to jump out at him at any moment.

His cat purred against him and he held her close. She soothed him and he loved her for her softness, tranquillity and the warmth of her luxurious fur. She was a constant, she was familiar and the very fact that she was with him after the whole ordeal was a comfort that he sorely needed.

The security tapes played in front of his eager eyes over and over, but they showed him very little. It was the feed from the cameras in and around his house that had automatically downloaded on to the main computer, recording the whole ordeal, but only from the outside. He had not allowed the cameras anywhere within his private space, which was a good thing after all, because it seemed to him that he would die of mortification, if anyone was to witness what had gone on in that house.

He had been afraid, very afraid and that was not a thing that he forgave lightly.

The recording showed the villa bathed in artificial lights and the apparent stillness surrounding it, with only the shades of black shifting in the background at fast- forward as the night progressed and the little clock in the corner of the screen raced faster than the eye could follow. Little seemed out of the ordinary, just another sleepy night like countless many before it, until a dark shadow landed on his roof, so vague, fleeting and brief, he would have missed it, if he had not been looking for it. It vanished inside in a blink of an eye and Lee's jaw clenched as he waited for the inevitable inferno, the explosion and finally the static that signalled the ultimate destruction.

Lee's head throbbed. The vivid, pulsing pain stemmed from the back of his scalp as if from a gaping hole of agony and spread, until it was almost beyond endurance. He knew that he should take a break. That he should let a doctor look at him and give him some painkillers. He probably had a mild concussion too, but he hated doctors to the point of madness, and with good reason too. He knew that in time, he would heal on his own, even without help, but miserable as he was, he would have been glad of medical assistance, if that did not mean enduring the touch and closeness of another human being, which was more than he was ready for after everything that had happened.

He stared at the static on his screen, his eyes hurting from the mess of grey and white, but was unable to look away. Finally, he leaned forward and rewinded, pausing when the awful shadow appeared. He selected it and zoomed, the creature finally showing its true shape: a dark, winged being, like a thing out of horror movies, almost like a huge bat, only with the form of a man.

The door clicked open behind him and he flinched, jumpy from the entire ordeal, even though he'd recognized the footfalls at once as familiar and unthreatening. His personal assistant, still so ridiculously young not to know to be afraid of him and foolish enough to be in awe of his eccentric persona, which was the reason why he had hired him. He needed someone stupid enough to be loyal and not melt in terror at the very thought of disagreeing with him. It put a clearer perspective on things, which was a commodity when a man rose so high, he forgot what it was like to walk on the ground with the rest of mankind.

"What is it, Mr. Andersen?" he asked with dull monotony, letting none of his anxiety show.

"I came to see if you needed anything, Sir," the assistant said.

"If I needed anything, Mr. Andersen, I would have buzzed for it," Lee said irritably. "So, unless you have something to say that I would be interested in hearing, please go away."

"The damage report is finished, Sir," the young man replied, undaunted by his lack of welcome.

Lee took the folder without looking at him and tossed it on to his desk, not bothering to open it. He already guessed at the ridiculously huge number in loss which meant very little to him under the circumstances.

"Mr. Lee…" Andersen said shifting awkwardly. "May I ask…?"

Lee shot him an impatient glance and the young man lowered his eyed.

"What happened, Sir?"

"There was a security breach," Lee replied.

"What kind of security breach?"

Lee glared.

"A serious one."

Andersen took the hint and moved on to the next topic.

"The environmentalists will give us hell for this," he said. "The phone has been ringing all night, with all kinds of organizations threatening multi-million dollar lawsuits. Apparently, the explosion has disrupted the marine flora and fauna which was the natural habitat of many endangered species. It would be a good idea to pay them off right now, because if this thing goes to court, the corporation will gain a lot of negative publicity. Not to mention that they would raise a lot of… um awkward questions. So far, we have managed to keep the cause of explosion as 'classified research', but I think that we'd rather not have anyone looking too closely at it all."

"No Mr. Andersen, we would not," Lee sighed irritably. "Do what you need to do to make this go away."

"The coastline is on tsunami alert," Andersen said. "Luckily, the other islands are uninhabited, or there would have been hell. The animals' rights activists will be on out case, though."

"I hate the fucking animals' rights activists," Lee said.

"The board of directors and all the major shareholders have been notified that you are safe unharmed," Andersen continued. "Everyone was most relieved. You sure gave us a scare, Mr. Lee."

"Hn," Lee barely acknowledged it. Like he cared about what a bunch of old men worried about their own fortunes thought of his wellbeing.

"An emergency board meeting will take place tomorrow," Andersen said. "I believe that it will discuss new safety measures concerning your esteemed person."

Lee scowled.

"Am I supposed to attend?"

"It would be optimal if you did, Sir," Andersen said. "It would certainly put many minds at ease. I do believe that they will discuss and vote for the assembly of a corporate private force, a part of which will be assigned to seeing to your personal safety."

"Corporate private force? Like a… military force?"

"Yes, Sir."

"No," Lee said firmly. "Absolutely not. I shall not allow it and I do believe that I still hold the power of veto here."

"But, Mr. Lee, G-Corp…"

"Don't compare us to G-Corp!" Lee stopped him sharply. "You know the kind of research we do here. You know what would happen if it was to fall into the hands of a military. An army is a monster that is difficult to control and I don't even want to think about what would happen if I formed a private one, especially one so close to my person. I value my freedom too much. Mr. Andersen."

"In any case, there will have to be new regulations in place," the young man insisted. "New measures. The security that has served us so far has obviously proven itself inadequate."

Lee grinned bitterly.

"Mr. Andersen," he said, "when I encounter a threat that I cannot handle myself, I very much doubt that a contingent of personal bodyguards will do me any good."

"But, Mr. Lee…"

"I said no! And that is the end of the discussion."

The young man hesitated, obviously unwilling to go away.

"What is it now?" Lee said impatiently.

"You are hurt!" Andersen said, instantly taking a step closer. "Please, let me look at it!"

Lee snapped, pulling away from his reaching hand and hissing in threat. He did not want to be touched. He would not be touched. The trauma of the night behind him was still too fresh to allow for any kind of human contact.

Andersen backed away.

"Is there anything else you need, Mr. Andersen?" Lee said pointedly.

"Uh… yes, sir," the young man answered, obviously uncomfortable. "We… umm… might have a problem."

Lee turned fully to face him.

"Might?" he said icily.

Andersen swallowed.

"We definitely have a problem."

"What problem?"

"Actually… it more of an issue than a real problem and it is… totally unrelated to any of this."

"Mr. Andersen, for pity's sake, please, talk already!"

Andersen looked down and pulled a rolled up magazine out of his back pocket. He handed it to Lee, who took it from him, irritable and unimpressed. He straightened the front page and his dark eyes widened in shock. He remained speechless for several long moments.

It was the last thing he would have expected, in the midst of everything else going on around him.

The headline blared in huge, tacky letters: "DANNY FLAME IS GAY!!!!"

The smaller, but no less conspicuous-looking question lurked under it, with a photo of him zoomed beneath it, questioning his identity: "BUT WHO IS HIS MYSTERIOUS FLAME?"

It was the latest issue of Ultimate Scandal, the cheapest, lowest, most widely read brand of tabloid in existence and it had his face plastered all over the front page. The overblown, red question mark flashed in front of his eyes like a blaring alarm and Lee felt his brain shut down for a moment from sheer mortification.

"Where the hell did this come from?" he asked in dismay and Andersen shrugged helplessly.

"It was all over the city yesterday," he said apologetically. "We reacted too late and couldn't get it pulled. It sold a million copies just in the first hour. Umm… I think that the number has reached several million now. It was all over the Internet in the blink of an eye!"

A disaster. An utter and complete disaster.

Danny Flame. Lee remembered Danny Flame. Sitting on top of the world, he had entered the fourth Iron Fist Tournament under a blare of headlines, fanfare and media frenzy, full of brazen confidence and completely oblivious to what he would be up against there. He was damn good fighter and a huge celebrity on the rise, which he owed to showing up as the lead in a couple of tacky martial arts flicks that only had bad acting going for them, followed by front pages of a wide palette of magazines, a brand of perfume, of male cosmetics, a line of sportswear for the 'ultimate man' and general overexposure in tabloids, which were constantly littered with all kinds of his doings, from his latest engagements, to where he'd had lunch on each particular day. The female half of the planet was wild about him and the male half wasn't indifferent either.

He was tall, handsome and flashy. American. Just the kind of man that Lee liked to fuck and fuck with, one that loudly proclaimed his hatred of fags and adamantly declared himself as a straight man, a real man, and one that had even believed it for the most part… until he had met him, that is.

Bored out of his mind and irked by the man's limitless arrogance, Lee had decided that it would be far more entertaining to face his opponent in a bed than in the ring. Besides, he had rather liked the look of his arse and concluded that there had to be better things that he could do with it, other than just kicking the shit out of it in a fight. In fact, if he wasn't so mortified by the headlines, Lee would have laughed, remembering how effortless it had been to uproot the foundations of the man's narrow-minded bigotry. The supposedly straight ones were always so easy and the encounter that he still remembered as mildly amusing had left his would-be-opponent stoned out of his mind the night before his opening fight, totally incapacitated for it and forced to pull out.

He was disqualified by default, returning to USA in utter disgrace, which was something that Lee had totally enjoyed. He loved messing with people's heads, especially when they made it so easy for him.

"Fuck," he exclaimed, staring in horror at the picture of the two of them, very explicitly engaged in what could mildly be called a French kiss, the vague comfort being that his hair was still dyed purple there and that it was highly unlikely anyone would associate the false name he had used at the tournament with his real one. He had made damn sure there were no clues left leading to his true identity. "Not a problem, you say? More of an issue? This is a disaster, a complete and utter disaster!"

"Sir, you can always look at the bright side." Andersen said, shrugging his shoulders and looking both amused and uncomfortable.

"The bright side? How does this horror have a bright side? I have a good fucking reason for keeping a low profile! I pay a damn fortune to a whole team bloody idiots, who are, by the way, so fucking fired, to keep my face out of the damn newspapers, and now you come to tell me that it is plastered all over the front page of a cheap tabloid that sold several million copies? Where is the bright side to that, because I totally fail to see it?"

"Well, Sir," Andersen said, "if I were you and my picture was to show up on the front page of several million copies of a cheap tabloid; I would at least take comfort in knowing that I look this good on it!"

Lee stared, speechless at his elaboration, forcing himself to mentally recite all the reasons why he shouldn't kill his personal assistant, so that he would not lose it and throttle him just for the fun of it.


	5. Fury I

Title: Ultimate Hate 05/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Part Five

G- Corporation was burning. Dark, thick smoke gushed out of the building headquarters and long tongues of orange licked around it, lighting up the night with an infernal glow.

"What's going on?" Senn demanded, arriving at the scene and staring at the destruction in dismay. He got no answers from the frightened, flying people, everyone too busy running for their lives to even remember his authority, let alone respond to it. "What the fuck happened here?"

The signs of rush were all over him, from his unfastened belt, to his open, billowing shirt. The last traces of sleep were still visible in his dishevelled hair and his eyes were swollen behind elegant, thin framed glasses. His face, which was shaped to be handsome in better times, was pale, drawn and thin from sheer exhaustion. They had woken him from what had barely been three hours of sleep, after he had spent three fucking days with no rest whatsoever, while dealing the crisis that had come before this one and just barely managing to contain it before it blew up in their faces. It had shaken the very foundation of the company and nearly brought it down, along with all of them, who were trapped within it and very much bound to its fate.

Screaming in helpless frustration, Senn pulled on his hair to the point of tearing it out, stressed out and crumbling under the pressure of finally being faced with a situation he could not control, after doing everything a human being could possibly do, to avert it. But it had been inevitable.

Kazuya Mishima was a plague upon them all.

"Hey!" he yelled and caught a screaming, flailing woman by her shoulders as she ran, limping, because her one foot was bare, while the other was still encased in a tiny shoe with a perilously high heal. "Hey! Hey! Stop it! Calm down! Stop!"

She screamed, out of her mind with fear and struggled against his hold. Impatient, Senn shook her hard until she sobbed in agony.

He recognized her, she was one of the pretty receptionists that had been stationed in the main hall and judging from the looks of her, she had been there when the building had burst into flames. Her usually perfect makeup was smeared and running, her eyes were red and swollen, and her face was blotched and smeared in soot, with long, dirty tear streaks running down her cheeks. She shivered in powerful, visible spasms under what appeared to be a borrowed, male coat that reached below the hem of her skirt and covered everything, except for her ripped stockings.

"Look at me!" he commanded sternly. "I said, look at me!"

Wide eyes stared, uncomprehending.

"Calm down," he told her, firmly and evenly. "Calm down the fuck down and listen! I am not going to hurt you. Pull yourself together and look at me! Do you know who I am?"

She blinked and hesitated.

"Do you know who I am?" he repeated, accentuating every word.

"Yes, Mr. Secretary," she whispered.

"What the hell is going on here?" he asked. "What happened?"

"He is in rage, Mr. Secretary," she wailed, her face pale and her eyes huge. "He just… just went mad all of a sudden and set fire to the building! The staff is already fleeing all over the place! The labs… oh, god, the labs! If the flame reaches the labs the whole block will explode!"

"Damn him!" Senn cursed. "What set him off?"

"I… I don't know!" the woman cried. "Everything was fine, everything was… normal and then he… he came… and… and he was… he was as he always is… angry, quiet, brooding, but he seemed calm… he seemed fine, until he saw the paper…"

"The paper?"

"The magazine," she explained. "A bunch of us was reading this… this magazine when appeared and he came to us to see what was going on. And when he saw it… when he saw it… Oh, god, when he saw it…"

She choked on her words, the memory of the horror overwhelming her and sending her into another flood of tears. Impatient, Senn shook her again.

"Hey," he said. "Hey! Enough of that! Tell me what happened."

"He… he got angry," she said. "He went mad and he… he just… changed! I mean, he actually, physically changed! Oh, God, he is not even a man! He is the devil! Oh, God, he is the devil! A being of Hell… Oh, God, he is a being of Hell and he is evil! We are serving the Devil! Oh, God, we are lost! We are forsaken! God help us, God forgive us! We are damned; we are all damned, damned, damned! Nothing will save our souls now! We must repent! We must re…!"

Senn slapped her hard across the face, having neither the time nor the patience to watch her fall apart. She stopped crying and looked at him in silent shock.

Seeing the Devil in the flesh had done little to reinforce Senn's spirituality. He had always been a highly practical man and approached even supernatural from a highly practical point of view. God, indeed. As if he would help them now, even if there was such a thing. He knew better than anyone else who they were taking orders from, what they had created and what the consequences of their decisions could be. He did not need to hear about it from someone who had only begun to grasp the depths of their peril, when the evil they had nurtured had risen up to turn against them.

"What were you reading?" he asked.

"What?" she said, the question too simple for her to comprehend.

"The magazine," Senn elaborated slowly, so that it would get through her panic and somehow force her muddled brain to form coherent sentences. He was trying hard not to lose patience, even if it was consuming all of his self control. "What were you reading when Kazuya came?"

"Ummm…" her eyes fluttered closed as she struggled to remember, the endeavour of going back in time to before the disaster distressing her. "Umm… it was a tabloid… Ultimate Scandal? I… I think."

Senn blinked.

"Ultimate Scandal?" he echoed in disbelief. It made no sense. "You think? For heaven's sake, use your head! This is important. Why would Kazuya Mishima go into rage over a fucking tabloid? Are you sure that it was Ultimate Scandal?"

Her perfect brows drew together and her pretty nose wrinkled as she invested the effort to remember. Then she nodded eagerly.

"Yes, it was!" she sniffed through tears. "I am sure! I remember! There was this article… about Danny Flame… The movie star? You know, the one who is also the boxer?"

"I know who he is," Senn said tightly.

"He is gay," she said, her eyes growing big as she remembered the sensation. "Danny Flame is gay! There were pictures of him doing it with… with this other man, who had purple hair! It was all over the front page!"

"Tsk," Senn huffed in contempt. "Danny Flame, indeed."

"It was," she wailed. "I swear, Sir, it was! And Mr. Mishima got so angry when he saw it… Oh, God, he got so angry…

At that moment, a violent explosion suddenly shook the building and she screamed, falling to her knees and covering her head with her hands. The middle floors of the building folded in upon each other, and like a house of cards, the entire thing started to collapse. It was loud, it was so terrifyingly loud, that it seemed the noise would never stop. The ground shook as if the very earth was being torn apart underneath their feet and the cowering onlookers covered their eyes and ears, cringing in terror.

"Where is he now?" Senn demanded. "Hey! Where the hell is fucking Kazuya Mishima?"

"I… Inside…" she shivered. "He is still inside…"

"Inside…?" Senn turned to look at the mass of rubble and ash. The fire and the smoke rose high above it and the rampant destruction terrified. The crumbling, breaking construction thundered in his ears, but over the cries of traumatized people, he suddenly experienced a frightening hope. "Is he dead?"

The woman shook her head helplessly, too scared to word her ignorance, but a sudden, blood-curdling scream rose above the noise and Senn stared, unable to believe his eyes as a large shape rose from the flames, spreading its monstrous wings and hovering above the ruin it had created for many long moments, as if crucified by its own torment and fixed to the spot. The wings flapped around him in slow, powerful motions, killing Senn's brief hope of liberation before it had even had the chance to fully form.

Senn removed his glasses, rubbed them clean and put them on again, looking on in horror and in awe as the creature arched its strong back and spread its arms out in a display of power, flexing its mighty wings and roaring its rage before rising higher towards the sky and finally, vanishing into the night.

"A helicopter!" Senn yelled an order at the terrified people, collecting himself quickly. "I need a fucking helicopter! Do you hear me? I need it and I need it now, while we still have something left to save!"

Following the creature was madness, but Senn had no choice. There was no way of telling what it would do in the midst of its inexplicable anger, but he knew what it was capable of. It had only been months since the massacre, when G- Corp had tried to fix its mistakes and kill the monster it had nurtured and allowed to rise to such uncontrollable power. The memories and the horror of it all were still fresh in Senn's mind, who had been in charge of cleaning up the mess and retrieving the dead once it was all over.

Kazuya Mishima had killed them all. The entire unit that had been sent after him. The men who had ordered it, the men he suspected were involved, the men he did not like. All the innocent people who had worked for them. An entire division of G-Corp was destroyed. Kazuya had burned them all, just because he could. He was G- Corporation's greatest blunder, one was likely to have dire consequences reaching far beyond the company itself.

"But, Sir…" the terrified woman at his feet stuttered, her eyes huge. "You can't possibly! He'll kill you if you go after him!"

Senn looked down at her with contempt. He knew better than anyone who Kazuya was and what he was capable of, but there were human lives at stake, years of research in the game and more money than he was willing to let go of.

Not to mention a decade of his own suffering, years of catering to the needs of a depraved monster and more sacrifice than he could even begin to account for.

He did not want to think about what the Devil would do in his state of madness and rage, who would see him at it and what it would cause. The existence of them all depended on secrecy and Kazuya Mishima clearly no longer had the presence of mind to care.

"Somebody has to," he said.


	6. Fury II

Title: Ultimate Hate 06/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Part Six

Filled with trepidation, Senn landed on the roof of an abandoned high rise. The building was broken and old; barely a skeleton of what had once been the magnificent seat of a mighty corporation. The icy wind whipped around him, howling eerily, while the decaying construction creaked over the massive, underlying silence.

Senn knew where he was and what the ruins around him were; the old headquarters of the Mishima Zaibatsu, destroyed over two decades ago, when Heihachi Mishima had violently taken back his position as the sole reigning lord of his mighty empire. The entire complex was destroyed in the final confrontation between father and son, leaving hundreds dead and the buildings devastated and burned.

Heihachi chose not to rebuild, disturbed and disgraced as he was by the reminder of his own defeat. He moved the Zaibatsu, determined to purge every trace of Kazuya, but kept the rotting corpse of the old establishment to serve as a warning to all those who would dare stand up against him, as well as a warning to himself; never to feel so secure, as to think of himself undefeatable again.

Ultimately, that had made him strong.

Senn had dared to follow Kazuya to this place only once, many years ago, but he still had nightmares about it. Wild vegetation burgeoned out of control in the midst of the ruins and most of the yawning horror hid behind the thick foliage. It burst out of charred windows of ruined houses, through collapsed roofs and from gaping cracks in the asphalt. The massive fires and explosions had swept over the neighbouring blocks in a disaster unparalleled to anything the people living at the time remembered, taking with it many innocent lives and reducing hundreds of homes to rubble and ash.

With the government in his back pocket, Heihachi had cleanly avoided all responsibility and the casualties were never acknowledged, nor the men standing behind the chaos ever brought to justice. The death tolls had been so massive, the general population had never returned to area. The living city turned its back on it and continued its expansion to the other side. After twenty years of silence and neglect, it was a place of ghosts and of danger. Death and disease crawled everywhere and wild, mutated animals prowled the shadows, while vagrants, hobos and criminals infested the silent, cluttered streets.

Senn was too young to actually remember the catastrophe, being only seven years old at the time and nowhere nearly aware enough to comprehend things like that, but he had lived with the backlash of it all. He'd keenly felt the oppression and dictatorship which had signified Heihachi's return to power. The terrifying losses his family had suffered on that account had brought him to G-corp, with the bright ideals of aiding a future corporation which could overthrow the Zaibatsu and restore justice and peace to that part of Japan, but for all his wonderful dreams, the only thing he had achieved through all his suffering, was to trap himself in wretched servitude to an evil far worse than the one he had set out to destroy had yet the means to become.

With natural hesitation, Senn approached a broken, swinging door that lead further into the darkness. He swallowed hard and forced himself to move forward, terrified of what he would find, yet determined to seek it out anyway. There was hardly anything left that the Devil could do to him that he hadn't done already and lately, Senn often found himself almost wishing for senseless violence that would put him out of his misery once and for all.

The stale stench of filth and decay nearly made him gag as he made his way through the darkness with a flashlight. He had to put his sleeve over his nose to breathe with at least a tolerable ease, listening to the wind howl though the abandoned hallways and trying to discern sounds of actual living beings over those of raging elements. The sparse light hit a frightening pile of what appeared to be dry, blackened bones. Human bones. The bodies of the dead had never been retrieved from the ruins of the Zaibatsu. Old skeletons still littered the abandoned corners, long since bleached by time and weather, and faded beyond all identity. Heihachi had condemned them even in death, for they had all worked under Kazuya and were therefore all guilty of treason in his eyes. The massacre he had caused was little enough punishment in his eyes.

A rotting skull grinned eerily from the shadows and Senn had to flinch at the morbid glee of the dead. He shuddered and turned hastily away, following a long, narrow corridor deeper into what had long since become a tomb for many.

He made his way through the rubble with caution, swiping away at curtains of cobwebs. Spiders as large as his hand scampered away in fright from his flashlight and he glimpsed large, vicious rats with frightening, leathery tails running for the shadows as he approached.

Layers upon layers of dust made him cough and he peered forward, covering his mouth against the stale, mouldy air. The stairs creaked as he descended down, careful of where he stepped. The rusty metal seemed less than stable, but he had no choice other than to trust it, which proved to be a mistake as his foothold suddenly gave out under him, sending him painfully down on to the floor below. He hit the cold concrete in a cloud of disturbed dust and shielded his head as a bunch of rubble descended upon him. He had to roll away quickly to avoid being crushed under the collapsing structure, but he breathed in a great deal of filth in the process. He coughed, hurting and confused, and discovered that his flashlight gone out and fallen out of his reach. His heart beat wildly and he found that the noise in the midst of the uninterrupted darkness had frightened him more than the uncomfortable plunge he had taken.

As the silence folded over him again, he peered forward, struggling to regain his composure. He staggered to his feet, even though every inch of him protested painfully at the exertion. Nothing seemed to be broken, so the discomfort failed to deter him from his intentions, but an inhuman scream stopped him dead in his tracks, telling him that he was nearer to his goal than he had initially supposed. The dust settled and he adjusted his misplaced glasses, which allowed him to spot a faint light at the end of the corridor. The infernal glow of what was likely very primitive lighting glimmered only just around the corner and Senn found himself so reluctant to turn it, that all his courage and resolve nearly failed him in that instant. Judging by the closeness of the frightening howl, there could be no doubt of the fact that Kazuya was right in the middle of it.

A frightening crash followed, as if something heavy was thrown hard against a wall and forced to shatter. Another heart-wrenching cry that spoke both of anguish and of rage came after it and drawn by reckless curiosity, Senn put an end to his hesitation.

With awe and horror, he found himself at the end of his search. Surrounded by filth and destruction, Kazuya knelt in the middle of a large room which must have been splendid at one time, but was now ruined and black. He crouched in the midst of the charred rubble, doubled over as if in great pain, screaming his wrath and fury. His voice was inhuman and the cries it produced were not those of a mortal man.

The red-golden light that he had witnessed earlier came not from any source of earthly power, but from a strange fire that licked all over the Devil's naked form. He was burning, and yet not burning, as if he was the source of the flame, but it did not seem to mar him in any way, because he himself was a part of it and therefore, couldn't be hurt by its heat. All the clothes he might once have worn were burned from him in the hell he had conjured and his naked body was strong, toned and intimidating, totally oblivious of its nudity and removed from all sense of shame. Frightening scars ran down his bent, powerful back in a terrible display of past suffering that had cost the man hiding behind this beast the last shreds of his sanity. Senn almost wouldn't have recognized him, for only his face retained some of its original form and this was only in its general lines. Everything else about him was different, frightening and strange. From the mess of his dark, unruly hair rose two tall, graceful horns and when he snarled, sharp, animal fangs glistened in his mouth. The fingers on his strong hands ended in long, deadly claws and though most of his torso still had its smooth, human skin, his legs and forearms were covered in thick, black fur which was very much like that of a beast. Awful, leathery wings that by no means belonged on a human body spread around him in a magnificent display of unearthly power and his eyes glowed very red.

Distracted only for a moment by the frightening sight before him, Senn's eyes quickly deducted the situation from his surroundings. There were papers all around him that spoke of an unhealthy obsession; newspaper clippings and pictures which did not date from two decades ago but were brought in far more recently, telling him that Kazuya came and lingered there often. In wonder, he realized that most of them bore the picture of an unusually radiant, beautiful young man. An old, charred photograph of him in a twisted, broken frame that had by some miracle survived the massive fires was resurrected by Kazuya and placed in a bold, visible place. It showed him young, probably no more than twenty years or so, happy and laughing, wearing dark glasses that covered almost half of his perfect face, with sunlight breaking on his strange hair that was white in colour, in spite of the fact that he was obviously Asian in every other respect.

Senn had done his research and he did not need to read the bold titles of the articles with no picture connected to them to link the face to a name. It was Lee Chaolan, the second son of Heihachi.

Kazuya's younger brother.

The newspaper clippings only reaffirmed what Senn already knew about him. Extraordinarily talented, sports sections spoke of his successes at various martial arts tournaments and proclaimed him as one of the greatest rising fighters. Unusually intelligent, the earlier clippings related to his academic achievements and subsequently, the later ones, to his business accomplishment. More flashy, but less interesting for Senn's eager eyes, were the articles revolving around his personal life; showing him accompanied by gorgeous women, none of which had seemed to stay around for long, and others that boldly questioned his sexual orientation as underground pictures of him resurfaced with other men. And finally, there were those that spoke of the horrific accident almost fifteen years ago, that had left him paralyzed from the neck down and his miraculous survival which had baffled the doctors who had admitted him. The most recently dated stories speculated on the truth of the matter and proclaimed him dead after all, for he had vanished entirely from both record and sight after that and they all reflected on the improbability of any human being surviving the injuries that he had sustained.

Senn stared, not knowing what to make of any of this, until finally, Kazuya turned his head to look straight at him.

"Do you want to die?" he asked, his powerful, inhuman voice vibrating menace.

"No, Mr. Mishima," Senn answered, doubting his sanity for being there in the first place.

"Then why come?" the Devil rumbled.

"I came to serve," Senn said, his voice barely audible.

Kazuya laughed, but there was no mirth in his laughter. It was bitter, violent and mad.

"What makes you think, little human maggot, that you can in any way be of service to me?"

He rose to his feet, graceful and frightening, magnificent in the midst of all his terrible appearance. Senn would have fled if he'd had the presence of mind to do it, but his fear kept him rooted to the spot. He saw the charred, twisted magazine clenched in the Devil's hand and his stomach turned.

"Sir, you are in pain," Senn dared, overcoming his terror. "I would help you, if I may."

The Devil roared his fury and Senn instinctively backed away. His eyes fell on to the front page and his gut twisted with doubt and speculation. He had not given much credit to his receptionist's account of the disaster, but now he saw that indeed, it was the stupid tabloid. It had the infamous Danny Flame plastered all over it and for a moment, none of it made sense.

Senn's mind raced to come up with a reason why that was the cause of such mayhem, but then his eyes fixed on the other face printed there, zoomed with a huge question mark wondering about his identity. Senn's blood ran cold, because in spite of the outlandish purple hair, he saw the obvious resemblance. Of course, the foolish receptionists wouldn't know it. Of course, she could never have seen it, but surrounded by Lee's pictures in this frightening shrine, Senn could not but notice.

He had never quite obtained the exact details of what had happened between Kazuya and his brother, but he was left under the impression that the relationship between them had been neither happy, nor loving. The little information he had gathered spoke of violence and animosity that he could hardly even begin to comprehend. Everything that he had ever heard of the two of them was threaded by struggle, hatred and jealousy and in a sickening way, it had somehow made sense that in spite of being brothers, they would hate each other with such profound passion.

Noting Senn's horrified interest and with credit to his intelligence, which was the main reason why he was still alive, Kazuya knew that of all the people who had seen the damning article, he was the only one who had fully understood what was in front of him. It compelled him to explain, if for no other reason, then to share his torment with another living being, and though he was no less angry about it, he almost seemed relieved to be able to speak.

"You cannot help me! Nobody can help me, because this is my business! Mine alone!" Kazuya said, twisting the paper cruelly between his hands until it ripped down the middle, tearing viciously between the faces of Danny Flame and the other man. "He has betrayed me! He has disgraced me! He is treacherous! He is unworthy and false, yet I still carry him here, like a poison, like a wound that cannot heal!"

The strong hand fisted and pressed over the scarred chest for emphasis and Senn was shocked by the obvious pain in the midst of the creature's infinite evil. He would almost have pitied him, if he could even for a moment overcome his revulsion.

"I hate him," Kazuya went on, his voice hoarse and almost breaking, as if he would weep if he had had the tears for it. "I hate him more than I can bear!"

"Oh, god," Senn whispered in mortification before he could restrain himself. "You think that your brother is alive!"

"I _know_ that he is alive!" Kazuya roared. "And when I get my hands on him, he will never again see the light of day!"


	7. Fury III

Title: Ultimate Hate 07/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence and angst. I don't really have to warn for yaoi by now, do I people?

Part Seven

Kazuya lay on the roof of the high rise, broken and exhausted by his rage. The icy wind howled, the cold bit into his flesh until it hurt, but the core of him still burned with hellish inferno, not letting him cool down and relax.

The sky above him was dark, but a tide of white and crimson was already rising on the eastern horizon. A bitter dawn was in the air and the stench of destruction lingered all around him. The smell of fire and ash clung to his nostrils and the taste of it stuck to the back of his throat.

Lee, his precious Lee. His difficult, perfect brother. His pretty, wilful lover. To him, sex and the power it had brought him had always been a game to be played. At times, it was also a tool to achieve goals, even a weapon, and Kazuya had vowed that he would never let him use it against him, because when it came to Lee, he knew that he was weak.

Fearing rejection and ridicule, Kazuya had suffered his lust in silence for years, biding his time and waiting for the moment when he would overthrow his father and take control over everything that was his. Heihachi's powerful, corrupt empire included his adopted son and even though his torments had consumed him, Kazuya was patient.

Lee had fought him every step of the way, unwilling to give up his freedom, which was what Kazuya had wanted from him the most. They had a year together. A year of being allies, of being brothers and ultimately, even lovers, but the experience had brought neither of them either happiness or the peace of mind. He had thought that gaining power over the Zaibatsu would give him a way to keep a leash on the man he desired, but that had been a futile dream.

There was no controlling Lee. He was too wilful and too strong. He had refused to submit and though outwardly obedient and respectful, Kazuya had always suspected that he had his ways of escaping him. The knowledge of this driven him wild with anger, until the Devil core inside of him had burned like a furnace and driven him to vent his rage in spectacular violence that had brought him no relief.

His attempts to curb Lee's power, his influence, had ended in anger and resentment on all fronts. His attempts to keep him only to himself had resulted in nothing but misery for them both. Between all the unhappiness and rage, there had been no time for love between them, but still, the more he had been given by his brother, the more he had wanted to take.

Lee was like a drug, an addiction that had turned against him before it had given him even the illusion of satisfaction. It was a vicious circle of lust and in despair, and Kazuya had discovered that the harder he'd tried to have Lee closer to him, the more he had felt him pulling away.

Losing him had been one of Kazuya's greatest defeats, but he had never imagined that it would be permanent, or that the distance between them would last for so many years. He was shocked to discover how little control he had over himself, even after all this time.

He had to have known that Lee would have slept with other people, but he had been unprepared for how much it would hurt to actually see it. Lee moved easily from person to person, walking over broken hearts as if they were nothing and Kazuya had hated him for it, consumed by his longing, jealousy and rage. The very thought of it was unbearable, but worse than the constant stream of lovers Lee picked and discarded indiscriminately was Kazuya's ultimate fear that one day, he would find someone to love and settle down. Someone other than him.

Could it be that Lee was in love with this man in the pictures? He had never been before, not with anyone, but then again, he had never been this careless, so at ease and uncaring of who may be watching, that he would allow himself to be caught on camera, doing such things in such a public place.

Kazuya was torn by not knowing. The terrible doubt plagued him and it rode high on the tide of his fears. Was this the man that Lee had chosen? If so, Kazuya would track him down and murder him. He would feast on his raw, beating heart and then he would tear him to pieces. He could not bear it, not this, not after so many years of loneliness and longing, because Lee was his and his alone! Lee was his ultimate prize and he would not be thwarted when he was so close to achieving his goal!

The knot of pain curled in his chest and he screamed as he remembered what he had seen.

Though he had ripped up the magazine, the image on the cover still burned and when he closed his eyes, he could see it, vivid and clear, with all the details emblazoned upon his memory like a brand of his shame. Lee was smiling as that man kissed him and it had been so long since he had seen Lee smile that Kazuya had almost forgotten how beautiful he was when he did it.

In the year they spent together, Lee had laughed rarely and in the last few months before they had finally parted, he had not laughed at all. Kazuya knew that he had only himself to blame, because Lee enjoyed being surrounded by people and he was jealous; jealous of all his acquaintances.

He had punished his smiles with jealousy and rage; even the passing, meaningless attentions, until Lee had stopped smiling completely and that had not been the victory Kazuya had hoped for. It was a bitter conclusion to all his efforts and it had devastated him, because the only thing worse than not having Lee at all, was having him while he was so unhappy by his side.

But the cover of the magazine was not the worst of it. When Kazuya had opened the damn thing, he'd found more pictures. Awful pictures.

Another man with his hand under his brother's shirt. Another man's tongue in Lee's soft, willing mouth. Another man on his knees in front of him, while Lee leaned back against the wall, lost in sheer ecstasy, with his long, elegant neck bent and exposed. Another man doing what Kazuya had never wanted to do and giving him pleasure in a way he himself had been too proud to give.

A large, star-shaped 'censored' stamp blared over the most explicit part of the image and he was spared having to see another man's mouth on Lee's erection, but there was little enough left to the imagination. The worst of it all was that Lee looked beautiful. He was trusting and vulnerable... he seemed relaxed like Kazuya did not remember him ever being while they were together. With him, Lee had always been irritable, anxious and scared; always been worried, suspicious and tense. He had always flinched when Kazuya reached for him before visibly willing himself to surrender to his touch, yet here he gave himself freely, open and exposed in front of a man other than him, letting it happen in a place so public, their activities had ended up on the front page of a tabloid, for the entire world to see.

In the picture, Lee's hair was dyed that horrible purple and he wore dark glasses over his eyes, but he was still so achingly familiar and unchanged. Kazuya knew his brother well and he easily recognised the tilt of his head as it fell back against the wall. His soft, elegant mouth was partly open and Kazuya remembered the unique curve of it. He knew that his eyes were closed behind the shades as he abandoned himself to the pleasure, because he had once watched so carefully for this sign of his surrender, revelling in the brief sense power that it had given him over the younger man.

"_Please..."_ the memory Lee's passion, of his raw, heavy and voice tormented him. _"Kazuya, finish it, please!"_

Kazuya shuddered deeply and pulled at his hair in agony as he imagined that other man hearing his brother beg for release. He had never gone down on Lee. He had never allowed Lee to do it to him, too afraid of the intimacy that it implied and the sheer vulnerability of giving up control in such a way.

After so many years of longing for him, Kazuya could no longer remember why he had been so ashamed to do it then. Lee was beautiful and every inch of him was perfect and clean. With punishing clarity, Kazuya still remembered the feel of him under the palms of his hands. His skin had felt like velvet over steel and it was pliant and warm. His body was like water, flexible and giving, but it was strong, it was enduring, and it did not break under the tide of his mad passions. There was nothing about him to dislike, nothing that could possibly turn him away, yet with tremendous strength of will, he had replaced his desire with aggression and a deep sense of disgust.

What had he been afraid of? That he would have more to lose, if he allowed himself to enjoy his lover properly? He had lost everything anyway and now he had to see _this_ as the culmination of his torment; another man taking what he had been so reluctant to take and satisfying his lover in ways that he'd been too insecure to try.

But then again, this man was normal, he was strong, gorgeous and self-assured. He did not have to live with the certainty of facing the mirror and seeing a monster reflected there. He did not have to be afraid of looking into his lover's eyes one day and being met with revulsion and fear. He was normal, he was human, and Kazuya both hated and envied him, angry and shamed by the man's very existence.

He knelt on the roof, assaulted by the wind, and endured the punishment the elements unleashed upon him. He sobbed in torment as he remembered. The Devil within him was gone, exhausted by its rage, and the only thing left of him to suffer the consequences of the night's rampage was the man, defeated and tired by the choices he made, and even though the rationally knew that he had only himself to blame, he still felt betrayed by the only man he had ever tried to love.

His throat was raw and aching, but screamed anyway, tortured by his grief and his loss. His turmoil was beyond endurance and the certainty of what had taken place, of Lee sleeping with someone else, someone so handsome and strong, lodged in his chest. It twisted and tore, until he could no longer tell where the emotional anguish stopped and the pain of his abused flesh began.


	8. Memories I

Title: Ultimate Hate 08/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst. Mentions of attempted rape and extreme abuse of a child.

Part 08

Lee dreamed.

Trapped in a subconscious world of fear, he was losing the battle with exhaustion, because it kept dragging him under. In spite of his efforts to stay awake, it forced him to look into the despicable, leering eyes of the monster holding him down.

A hand around his throat. An unwelcome tongue in his mouth. An engorged erection pressing against him. A creature intent upon doing him harm.

"_No."_

The stench of mayhem that clung to his assailant was vivid and the memory of his red eyes burned like embers, emblazoned upon his mind like a curse. The line between Lee's nightmares and his reality was a thin one and the face morphed and changed as unwanted recollections resurfaced in his sleep, making him relive the terror of times he had long left behind.

A hand reached for him. Tentative, whispering fingers touched his face.

With a cry, he shot up from the bed and barely registered the surprise as his fist struck a solid body. Things that should have stayed forgotten roughly burst out of the confines of his psyche. An old fear spilled over into his present, violating his sanity and suddenly making his terrors real.

With his perception still clouded over by the interrupted slumber, he let his reason shut down. Instinct took over and his hand clenched around somebody's throat. He slammed a human weight into the wall with a force powerful enough to break bones and it took many long seconds of madness before he realised that his enemy's struggles were too weak for a real menace. The frame of the body that he held a foot above ground was too light and too easy to overcome.

"Sir... sir, please," hoarse, nearly soundless words broke through the haze of his violence.

Lee blinked and the world slowly reassembled itself around him once more. A strange, unfamiliar room. Pale, dimmed spotlights on the ceiling above him. The comfortable, reassuring hum of the air conditioning. His hand squeezing upon real flesh. A throat on the verge of being crushed under the force of his grip.

Weak fingers clawed at his wrist in a hopelessly futile effort to dislodge his hold and Lee found himself staring into a red, familiar face. Bulging, terrified eyes pleaded with him desperately, because the young man's choked, gurgling voice failed to form the words to beg.

With sudden horror, Lee finally knew him. Andersen.

Roaring, he pulled away, leaving his assistant to slide down against the wall and gasp for breath. Only seconds more and he would have killed him.

"You bloody idiot!" he yelled as the frightened youth cradled his bruised throat and gasped like a fish on dry land. "What the hell did you think that you were doing? I could have killed you! Do you realise that? I could have fucking killed you!"

"I..." Andersen tried, but his voice was broken and cracked. He massaged his throat and tried again. "Sir... I am very sorry, sir."

Shivering all over, Lee drew his hands through his hair, in an attempt to regain his calm. Breathing hard, he did it again and in passing, his hand brushed against his cheek, only to stop there in abrupt shock.

His face was wet.

He wiped at it again, but there was no denying it. He found tears under his fingertips and that meant only one thing.

He had been crying in his sleep.

Mortified, he stared at the treacherous evidence of moisture on his palms, but it was not the weakness itself that disturbed him so much, because it had happened often enough not to be a novelty and had gone on for as long as he could remember. He had nightmares, he had always had them, yet the difference was that this time he had not been alone. There was someone else there to see him him falling apart, but Lee found that he could not voice a command that would send him away.

Sick all of a sudden, he rushed towards the bathroom and barely had the time to shut the door, before bending over the toilet and throwing up everything that his stomach had to give.

He couldn't stop heaving for a long while. Painful cramps sent him reeling and he crouched on the cold tiles, waiting for them to pass, with his head between his knees.

When he finally managed to stand, he was trembling all over. He leaned on to the sink and ran warm water over his hands. He splashed it on to his face and washed away the offending traces of tears.

His eyes were huge and very dark as they looked back at him from the mirror, haunted by the ghosts he'd thought were forgotten. He was glad for the dim darkness hiding his features from him, because he was afraid of the face that he would see if he turned on the light.

"_Please, please, please..."_

It had been many years since he had spoken Cantonese, even in his dreams.

It was frightening, because with his awareness intact, it became clear that this was not a nightmare. It was a memory; one that he had repressed for decades, to the point of non-existence. Things he had buried were coming back for him at last.

"Heihachi," he closed his eyes and whispered the name of the man who had given him life as surely as if he had conceived him in his mother's womb.

There were too many blanks in his early years and Lee had spent most of his adulthood struggling with things he could not remember. Everything before the Honmaru was a blur, with random details resurfacing at random intervals and torturing him with doubts, hints and speculations. He had tried talking to a psychologist once, as an adult, after he'd cut all ties with the Zaibatsu, but by that point, he had already been speeding towards self-destruction, trapped on the road of depression that had followed Kazuya's death.

It would have probably worked out better if she had not been so damn pretty. If she had been ugly and old, he may have at least tried to take her seriously, but he only had himself to blame for this, because he himself had picked her for her looks rather than her expertise, thereby sentencing any professional relationship between them to doom, right from the very start. Regardless of what he'd told himself at the time, the truth was that he had not been seeking closure with her.

He had been after escape.

He'd confided that he had trouble sleeping and vaguely hinted on to why. Refreshingly optimistic and eager to help, she'd told him how children often suppressed memories of traumatic events and suggested therapy to help him recover them. He'd agreed, but not out of a serious desire to improve his mental health. She had been heartbreakingly young and he'd been fascinated by her innocence. She was a novelty in his world of vice, violence and depravation and he'd lost himself in the hint of distraction that she'd offered from the profound, aching grief that Kazuya's death had left him with.

He should have known better. He should have realised that it would not work, but the pain of his loss was taking away even his ability to function and he had been too lost in his turmoil to worry about the moral ambiguity of taking advantage of a naive young woman's infatuation in his quest for relief, no matter how temporary. She had been sinfully easy prey.

It had taken two sessions before their relationship turned sexual and the end results had not been... mutually beneficial. He vaguely remembered that she had attempted suicide after he'd crushed her aspirations towards true love, but he could not be sure whether or not she was successful. Those days were still a haze to him; a blur of drugs, substance abuse and meaningless sexual escapades that had ended with him driving his car off of a cliff and killing two people in the process.

There was no escaping anything and in spite of all efforts, the ghosts of the past always caught up with the future, seeking payback. He knew this for a fact and punched his fist painfully into the wall as the details of a lost time rushed back, crowding out all his other thoughts.

"Fuck!" he cursed, barely restraining himself from screaming.

Heihachi had always refused to answer his questions about where he had found him, or the circumstances of his adoption, getting angry at even a hint of interest in his biological family.

"_I am your father!"_ he would snarl. _"You have no parents but me!"_

Fighting with Heihachi got him nowhere.

"_Am I not good enough for you? Are you dissatisfied with everything that I have given? Ungrateful brat! I took you in from the streets and turned you into a prince and this is how you repay me? You are my son and you will not deny me!"_

On his own, Lee had remembered being sick for a long time and then waking up in a wondrous world of security and isolation, where everything was strange and unfamiliar. There had been a new language to learn. New customs to get used to. School and other children. Other boys who were eager to be friends and who didn't seem to know that his white hair was the sign of a curse.

And then the training to turn him into the best fighter the world had ever seen. Discipline and strict schedules to keep. He'd discovered that he had a brother and started on the never ending struggle to co-exist with a creature so stoically devoted to not getting along. There had been no time left for reminiscence, until every trace of who he was, who he had been, had drifted beyond clear memory.

Lee ran his wet hands through his hair and closed his eyes.

"Why?" he whispered. "Why now?"

He had years of conflict and fighting behind him, but it had taken this particular act of violence to trigger this. It was all coming back to him in an unbearable flood of images, of sickening details, and there was no stopping the onslaught of recollection once it chose to resurface. It was vivid, too horribly vivid, even after four decades of distance. All of it was so clear, as if he had never forgotten, and suddenly, many things were beginning to make sense at last.

The cold. He remembered the cold. He'd spent his entire life hating it. He'd moved from one tropical haven to another to avoid it for years, but now he remembered why.

He had once had a mother. He remembered that she died and that strange people moved into their shabby little house. It was in the middle of the winter and the snow was thick and very white.

The bitter, freezing temperatures stabbed to the bone and he could find no place to get warm. The only clothes he owned were inadequate and old. His light shoes were falling apart and he shivered, standing on the outskirts of society, looking in on the lives of strangers with despair.

He remembered being alone, with no one to turn to for comfort and help.

"_Look at his hair,"_ whispers followed him whenever he tried to seek out sanctuary and pale, drawn faces looked at him with horror everywhere he went._"The colour of death. It is the colour of death! Stay away from him. Don't touch him. Don't talk to him. He was marked with death by the gods themselves!"_

He remembered the filth and the poverty. With half the planet ravaged by wars, there was not enough of anything. Medicine was rare and disease ran rampant among the community. He had to fight for scraps of food. He fought people. He fought animals. He struggled and he bled, but somehow, he survived.

He knew martial arts. He had been able to fight even before Heihachi and was good at it too! Closing his eyes, he recalled an old man in his life. A sick old man. A master, renowned for his skill.

"_Practise,"_ a long forgotten voice echoed through the stuffy fog of many years. _"You must practise. I will not be around to protect you forever."_

But, left on his own, Lee had discovered that what he'd learnt was not enough.

They caught him, of course. The cruel men. The wicked men. The bounty hunters, trawling the streets for the unwanted and homeless, who were needed for the underground fight clubs, in which unarmed men were pitted against beasts, elements and often, against each other. These were the fights to death and men bet on the outcome; on who would live and how long he could survive. It was a lucrative business and he had managed to evade them for longer than expected, but it was inevitable that he would end up in their clutches sooner or later.

He remembered another boy. Taller than him. A little older, maybe. Thin, hungry and insane. He remembered killing him with his bare hands. He remembered the dogs. Vicious dogs with drool hanging from their jaws and fangs glinting in the filthy darkness. He remembered being bitten and the crude, dirty bandage he'd made by ripping up his bloody shirt.

But that was not the worst of it. He remembered a man; this tall, swarthy, sweaty man who had looked at him with a licentious fever in his small, beady eyes. The Ringmaster of the club.

He remembered the horror of cruel hands holding him down as they groped and fondled him. He remembered them ripping the weary clothes from his flailing limbs. He remembered other men watching. Cheering. Laughing.

He remembered one in particular sitting calmly and looking on in grim silence, not taking part, but not protesting the infamy either. He was tall, heavy and strong. A prominent bone structure outlined his features and a bald patch crowned the top of his head. A moustache framed a cruel, sneering mouth. His dark, evil eyes glinted with interest under thick, bushy eyebrows and they watched him fight with all the odds stacked against him, waiting for the outcome.

Waiting to see if he could win.

He remembered screaming until he was slapped so hard, he nearly passed out. He remembered the thick, wet tongue forcing its way into his mouth. He remembered biting and choking on the blood as it spilled down his throat. He remembered clawing at his tormentor and his fingers sinking into something pliant and soft and feeling it break under the pressure with an almost audible pop.

An eye. He had gouged out the Ringmaster's eye and the shriek that had followed ran rampant through his mind over and over again, as if he could still hear it.

He remembered the pain as he was beaten and kicked. He remembered the fire of the whip as it fell upon him, shredding his clothes and cutting into his skin until he bled.

He remembered struggling and fighting to get away, but there was no breaking free. Arms thick as young tree stumps picked him up. They hurled him into the darkness and closed the door on his terror. The bolt slid in place even as he screamed and lunged forward, slamming his small, grimy fists against the unyielding iron and wood.

"_No, no, no!" _he cried. _"Please! Anything! Please, sir, anything! Just, please... no!"_

His despair fell on to deaf ears and he thought that he heard the men laugh in amusement as they walked away.

He remembered listening for their footsteps in the midst of rising panic, but they faded, leaving him there.

Afraid. Alone. Trapped in the dark.


	9. Memories II

Title: Ultimate Hate 09/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst. Mentions of attempted rape and extreme abuse of a child.

Part 09

Lee slid down to sit on the floor and leaned his head to the wall, overwhelmed by the memory which was now startlingly clear. He closed his eyes to overcome the dizziness, feeling like a man who had awoken from the haze of an overlong dream and discovered that there was logic to the world once more.

The running water from the tap that he had not bothered to close disrupted the thick silence and Lee wondered how he could have repressed all of this for such a long time. Pieces of his childhood which had been missing for years were finally reassembling themselves and they fit together like a puzzle, completing a picture that had been torturing him with its vagueness for too long.

This was Jinpachi's doing. It had to be. The creature had tampered with his mind and sneaked around his deepest, subconscious fears for who knows how long, before he'd managed to wake up. It made sense to blame the supernatural for this avalanche of recollection. The physical assault that had followed was hardly the first time that a man had tried to force unwanted sexual advances upon him. With his looks, it had happened often enough not to be a particularly shocking experience, because there was always someone out there who either didn't know who he was, or what he was capable of.

But then again, this time had been different. It was both frightening and deeply personal, even though he had still managed to defend himself.

Groaning, he covered his face with his hands. The tiles were unbearably cold under his feet and they chilled him to the core, but he could not summon the strength he needed to get up and break the vicious stream of reminiscence.

He remembered that he had screamed in his underground cell until he was hoarse. His fingers had left bloody trails on the bolted door when he'd tried to claw his way though and in the midst of his panic, the pain had been an insignificant concern. With no light and no windows, the only thing that had kept him from suffocating in there was a narrow shaft, barely wide enough for his skinny arm to fit through.

The cell was so tiny, he could not stand up straight in it and the only way he managed to lie down on the cruel, hard floor, was if he curled up in a ball. The foul, humid air was rancid with the stench of his blood and excrement. The cold was so bitter and profound that it chewed at his very bones and the damp, threadbare remains of clothes he'd worn offered no protections at all. He curled his bare feet under him, in an attempt to preserve warmth and cried long after his tears dried up, begging, even though there was nobody left to hear him.

He'd been given no food and no water for days and the thirst tortured him more than the hunger. His dry lips bled and his empty stomach hurt both from the lack of nourishment and from the filth surrounding him. He knew that this was death, but it was slow, cruel and terrible. Sick, exhausted and weak, he had dreamed his dead mother's face like he remembered it last; rigid, cold and decaying, with rivulets of blood seeping from her nose and the corners of her mouth. She had opened her glassy eyes to look at him and he had known that his own end was finally close.

"_Please,"_ the words came back to him. _"Please, I'll be good! I swear I'll be good! Anything! I'll do anything, just please, please, please..."_

When the door finally opened after what had seemed like an eternity of anguish, the creaking of the hinges sounded like thunder to his sensitive ears, but he could not be sure if it was real, or if insanity had finally taken him.

"_So, little whelp,"_ the cruel, cold voice of the Ringmaster fell upon him like a judgement and when his eyes adjusted to the sudden light, he saw the face of his tormentor once more. He wore a patch over his ruined eye, with edges of a white bandage peeking underneath. His face was somewhat paler and the lines around his mouth harder, but otherwise, he remained unchanged, still seeming strong, big and all-powerful to his frightened gaze. _"Looks like your luck has not abandoned you yet! Someone important has shown interest in your sorry hide and I can't deny him, even if it does rob me of the pleasure of paying you back like you deserve." _

He touched the bandage on his face with the sharp, glinting edge of a long, wicked knife andterrified by his presence, Lee summoned the last of his strength to crawl and beg for forgiveness.

"_I am sorry... sorry, so, so sorry..."_

"_I am sure you are," _the man sneered. _"But it is too late to be sorry! You better behave yourself for him now! You better do as you are told, like a good little whore, because if I hear that you've grown an attitude again, I'll feed you to my dogs in little pieces. While you are still alive." _

"_Never again,"_ he cried. _"I'll never, never, never do it again!"_

"_Up,"_ the man growled, grabbing him by his wrist and dragging him out with such brute force, that it sprained. His scream was a choked, pitiful thing and Lee thought that he must have passed out from sheer agony.

He remembered being awoken again by the blaring sun, because the clean, snow-covered daylight hurt. The pure cold nearly made him lose consciousness once more as he was thrown across the courtyard. His knees bled through his ripped jeans and his head spun.

"_You reek,"_ the man spat, his nose crunching up in disgust and Lee's bare, bent back shivered under his scrutiny. _"You stink like the filthy alley dog that you are and I cannot send you to him looking like this!"_

Lee remembered trying to raise himself to his feet and failing, because he had no strength left in his limbs under the raw, throbbing pain. A sudden burst of icy water hit him and he screamed in agony, choking on the cold. The white, blinding spray threw him forward and he struck the wall with a force hard enough to break bones. All his wounds reopened from the violence and each one of them howled their protest, but with his throat constricting in agony, he'd been unable to produce a sound. He crouched there in torment, vainly shielding his head with his thin, bleeding arms while the man hosed him down, laughing as he did it.

He crawled, trying to escape, and the Ringmaster taunted him, making fun of his futile, pathetic effort.

"_No, no, no, no,"_ he chanted the denial like a charm, but he was no longer saying it, only wishing that he was as the torture went on and on, making the core of him freeze up and wither.

Lee remembered the moment he died. Or, more precisely, he remembered the wonderful dream that had begun where the horror of his reality had stopped, leaving him stranded in a white emptiness. He gazed upon a great sun, but the light did not hurt his eyes, even when he looked straight at it. In a moment of wonder, he'd felt neither cold, nor afraid. He stood naked and clean, bathed in an aura of bliss. He was strong as if he had never known either injury, or weakness, and overcome with the relief, he felt an unbearable need to run towards the luminous brightness. His body was light, like a feather, and he was drawn towards it with an unspoken promise of tranquillity and salvation.

But it didn't last. It couldn't last. A sharp, burning pain broke the spell cruelly and his unwilling lungs filled with air.

"_... Back," _he heard the urgent, worried supplication. _"Child, come back to me!" _

"_Noooo!"_ he wailed in despair, clawing after the fading illusion. The real world reaffirmed itself mercilessly, assaulting him with a myriad of anguish. He wept as his body regained its weight, becoming too heavy, too dirty to follow the ethereal path. He shivered violently and heaved with pain as reflexes forced him to breathe. The pitiful remains of clothes clung to his limbs in wet, sticky shreds and the thick blood pooled under him, diluted in a puddle of dirty water.

He was too weak to sit up on his own, but somebody lifted him and held him close. He grasped after the illusion of warmth and desperately clutched a fistful of a crude, linen shirt. Large, muscular arms wrapped around him and he was rocked against a powerful chest in an attempt to share the generous body heat.

"_Shhh..."_ a booming voice soothed him as large hands attempted to rub the frozen numbness out of his fragile limbs, replacing it with the harsh pain of the returning blood-flow. _"I've got you now."_

He tried to open his eyes and look up at the man, but he saw nothing through the mist clouding his vision, except for a hint of dark, bushy eyebrows on a broad, frightening face.

Finally, the darkness took him and he was aware of nothing else for a long while.

When he woke up again, he was surrounded by people, noise and instruments. A hospital. It was a hospital and he was lying in a narrow bed, while the steady beep recorded his heartbeat.

Lee remembered the ICU where they put him; a white, sterile place infused by a morbid silence that was interrupted only by the regular hum of the machines keeping him alive and the soft, almost soundless footfalls of nurses coming and going. The pain was the clearest thing that he could ever hope to reclaim from the events that followed, because even now, they were a haze of fever, fear and anguish.

He was so sick, he couldn't stay awake for more than a minute at a time and there was not an inch of him that didn't hurt.

Needles poked out of his arms, feeding his blood with pale liquids and all the while, there was a man out there, looking in through the glass door of his room, eagerly waiting for any sign of consciousness.

It was the tall, intimidating man with cruel eyes under bushy eyebrows that had sat by, watching his tormentors do unspeakable things to him and a distance of forty years finally allowed him to put a name to the face.

Heihachi Mishima. The man he had called father ever since.

Unable to move, unable to speak, with a tube down his throat and a mask over his face helping him breathe, he had still tried to tear it all off and escape when he'd seen him, but he was sedated at once and there was no going anywhere, even if he'd had the strength for it.

Lee remembered drifting in and out of consciousness; knocked out both by the drugs and his own weakness. He could not tell how long it had gone on, or how long he'd stayed at the hospital as his strength slowly returned to him. It could have been days and it could have been weeks.

He slept for long periods of time and Heihachi was always there, both in the grim reality and in his troubled dreams. When he finally woke up to something resembling clarity, his throat was torn and aching, but the mask was gone from his face and he was breathing on his own.

A dim outline of a man's body leaned over him and a large, rough-skinned hand lay over his forehead. Dizzy and confused, he blinked several times to clear his vision and consumed by his terror, he bolted upright when he recognised Heihachi's face. The needle from the IV drip ripped out of his arm and dripped blood over the sheets.

"_Easy, easy there, little one!"_ Heihachi said as he curled against the head of his bed. _"I am not going to hurt you!"_

"_What... what do you want?" _

"_I've come for you,"_ Heihachi spoke slowly, carefully, as if Lee was some small, feral animal that he wanted to soothe and to trap. _"I've come to take you away with me."_

"_I don't want to go anywhere with you!"_

"_And where will you go, if not with me?"_ His tone was pleasant and reassuring, but Lee knew better than to trust him, because it did not suit him at all. _"You are all alone. You have no home. No family. No friends. It is only a matter of time before the streets kill you again."_

"_Again?"_

"_You died child,"_ Heihachi said. _"Your heart stopped. It was I who brought you back! I breathed the life back into your chest and held you against me, until you regained your warmth!"_

"_No!"_

"_Yes. And if I had come only a minute later, I would not have been able to revive you."_

"_Then you should have let me die!"_ he cried, but his words were weak, pathetic things.

"_The streets are no place for a little boy,"_ Heihachi said, reaching forward slowly to wipe his tears away with a brown, calloused thumb_. "Especially not for one as pretty as you, because there will always be men with base, dirty needs out there to hurt you!" _

"_And you are different?"_

_Heihachi smiled, but the flash of his straight, white teeth seemed feral and cruel under the thick, dark moustache._

"_I want to protect you," he said. "I want to take you home with me. To Japan. As my son."_

"_No." _Lee whispered.

"_No?"_ Heihachi repeated, amused. _"You don't want to come?"_

"_No."_

"_You don't want to be my son?"_

"_No."_

"_Are you sure about that? I am a rich man! You would never want for anything again in your life!"_

"_You were there,"_ Lee hissed, drawing as far away from him as he could. _"You watched them do horrible things to me!"_

"_Ah, yes,"_ Heihachi admitted with no guilt and no excuses.

"_Why? If you wanted me to be your son, like you say, why didn't you stop them?"_

Heihachi laughed.

"_I had to know if you were worthy!" _he said_. "So, I watched and I saw that you are a fighter! You are a child, yet you took on grown men and came out victorious! I saw that you are strong and that with proper upbringing, you could become great! Needles to say, I am impressed."_

"_Victorious?" _Lee whispered in mortification._ "You call this a victory?"_

"_I do,"_ Heihachi said and his dark eyes glinted with speculation and approval, _"You fought for your honour with the same valour you that fought with for your life! You survived, keeping it intact and I have a need for a son like you. An heir who would bring credit to my name!"_

Lee remembered wanting to tell him that this was not true. He was put in a cage with starved dogs and drugged-up men that would have killed him if he had not killed them first. His terror had made him resist his captor when he'd almost raped him, not a sense of pride and chastity. He had amply regretted fighting back when he had been thrown into the cell as punishment for defiance and would have done anything to take the moment back.

He had fought because he'd had no other choice, not out of a conscious decision to do so. Heihachi's words were a lie and he wanted to scream his hatred at him and throw it into his face, because he had called something filthy and terrible a great and noble deed.

"_Yeah?"_ he told him instead. _"But I have no need for a father like you!"_


	10. Memories III

Title: Ultimate Hate 10/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Part 10

He was still feverish and weak when Heihachi approached him the next day.

"_I have a present for you,"_ he told him and the grim doctor standing by the door shook his head in disapproval.

"_What kind of present?" _Lee asked suspiciously and pulled away in mistrust.

"_One that you will like," _Heihachi said and smiled._ "Come, child, you are too pretty to be afraid of being touched."_

Lee was too sick to walk on his own, so Heihachi carried him out. He had no clothes other than the pyjamas the hospital had provided and Heihachi wrapped him up snugly in his long, fur-lined coat. It still retained the heat of his flesh and Lee breathed in deeply the musky scent of him, discovering that it was not unpleasant. He hid from the frigid, morning air and huddled closer against his chest, because it felt good to do so. When he closed his eyes, letting himself drift, he almost forgot where he was and who he was with. For a moment, he could almost surrender to the illusion of feeling warm, protected and safe, which was a welcome fantasy.

A long, luxurious limousine was waiting for them and he drifted in and out sleep for the whole duration of the ride, with his head resting on Heihachi's lap. The man's rough, calloused fingers drifted through his hair and time became a vague, insignificant thing, while he treaded the limbo between reality and delusion.

The drive seemed infinitely long as the past and the present merged; confusing the dead with the living in his fever-conjured dreams, until the car finally stopped and Heihachi carried him out into the bright sunlight.

Lee panicked when he realised that he had taken him back to the compound of the ring fights.

"_No!"_ he struggled desperately and screamed, but he was held him firmly and couldn't get away.

"_Shh,"_ reassuring words whispered against his hair. _"Nobody will hurt you, child. You are with me now!"_

It did nothing to soothe his terror, but gradually, as they walked deeper into the complex, his frightened eyes took note of things that shouldn't have been there... things that he had not seen before.

Signs of violence and destruction lay scattered all over the place. Shattered windows littered the floors and charred, broken furniture cluttered the hallways. There were red stains on the walls and he shuddered when he realised that the dark, unfamiliar puddles on the floor were blood that nobody had bothered to mop up.

A deathly, unnatural silence reigned all over the place, broken only by firm marching of stoic, masked men in green uniforms who were too clean and too disciplined to belong there. They stopped and saluted when Heihachi approached and surprised, Lee saw that all of them were heavily armed.

"_Who are they?" _he asked and his wonder overcame the fear.

"_They are mine,"_ Heihachi said and the corner of his mouth curled up in smug satisfaction when he noted his amazement. Lee stared as they encountered more of them, wading through the mess and destruction as if they owned the place, going on about their business like a plough through an anthill. _"Are you impressed yet?"_

A paramilitary.

Speechless, Lee saw two of them dragging a beaten, filthy, tattooed man out into the courtyard. He kicked viciously, screaming obscenities at them with a mouth filled with blood, and Lee realised that it was one of the bounty hunters that had brought him there.

"_Money is the key to power,"_ Heihachi told him. _"And power is the key to obtaining whatever else your heart desires! It is the way to becoming immortal! It is the way to being a god."_

A bloodcurdling scream was followed by the deafening roar of a machine gun and Lee jumped, hiding his face against Heihachi's neck. It was over in seconds and in the stifling silence that followed, he could hear his heart beating wildly against the backdrop of Heihachi's calmer, far more even pulse.

"_Don't be afraid,"_ he said to him. _"With me, you never need to be afraid again. I want to give you everything. Power. Protection. Wealth and education. You will never be hungry. Never cold. Never scared. I will be your father and you will be my son. I am offering you a family and all I ask for in return is your obedience. Your love. Isn't that a fair bargain? Isn't that what a family gives?"_

"_I already have a family."_

"_A dead one,"_ Heihachi reminded and Lee cringed. _"With me, you will have a father once more! You will have a brother and you will never be alone again!"_

_A brother._ Lee had always wanted one, because he was so tired of being isolated and on his own.

"_Why did you bring me here?"_ he asked.

"_Because I want to prove to you how serious I am about this,"_ Heihachi said. _"And to show you how much I have to give."_

He carried him outside into the arena, and there, on bloodstained sand, knelt two dozen men with their hands tied behind their backs. Heihachi's people patrolled behind them, with automatic rifles pointed at their heads.

One of them stood out, forced two feet or so in front of the others, and he had a guard all to himself. He looked up when Heihachi entered and his one, healthy eye widened when he saw the child in his arms.

It was the Ringmaster of the club.

Lee almost didn't recognise him without the multitude of rings on his brown, wizened hands. He seemed so different without his turban and the robes. If it wasn't for the eye- his hollow, gouged-out eye with the shrivelled piece of skin that had once been the lid hanging over the empty socket, he would not have known him. The last time he had seen him, he had been smug and all-powerful, but kneeling in front of Heihachi, his strength seemed to have evaporated.

He looked like he had put a up a fight; his nose was broken and his face swollen and bruised. He shivered from the cold in a torn, bloody shirt and it seemed as if he had somehow shrunk in size as well as in might. In wonder, Lee saw that he was just a man... an ordinary, dirty man, with nothing to speak for him in his state.

"_Take a look, my child,"_ Heihachi said. _"This is what your enemies become when you have the power to bring them down!"_

The Ringmaster laughed and spat blood at them. A dark hole gaped where his front teeth should have been and Lee cringed from the sight.

"_So, this is it, Heihachi?"_ he said with contempt. _"You violate the laws of friendship, decorum and hospitality for this? For a child? For that dirty, worthless, fatherless brat?"_

Heihachi smiled.

"_You have always been a poor judge of a man's worth,"_ he replied. _"And you are mistaken. This boy has a father. He has me. He is my son and it is my duty to compensate him for what he went through here." _

The Ringmaster sneered at him.

"_Well, I certainly hope that your own judgement of worth will serve you better than mine has served me, because this means war and you may not find the price you'll pay for this whelp much to your liking! You will not get away with this unscathed!" _

"_I do not fear your war, maggot,"_ Heihachi laughed. _"Your lives mean less to me than the dirt under my feet! I shall pay the price gladly."_

He shifted, transferring all of Lee's unremarkable weight on to his one arm. He extended his free hand to one of his men, who offered him a gun.

"_Here, child,"_ he said, putting it into Lee's small, white palm. _"Let me teach you how to shoot."_

Filled with revulsion, Lee took it anyway, and was amazed by how heavy it was.

"_Hold it properly... yes, like that,"_ Heihachi's larger, far stronger fingers wrapped over his weak, tiny ones, giving him the leverage he needed to balance the gun properly. _"Now, breathe slowly... do not be afraid, killing a man is easy. Keep your fingers out of the path of the slide... you don't want it catching them when the guns fires... yes, that's good... Put your finger on the trigger... just like that... Now, aim!"_

Lee squinted aligning the gun with the man's head. It took effort to see properly, because his vision blurred under an assault of dizziness, but they were standing only two feet away. With Heihachi's willing help, he could not miss.

"_You are a false ally and a false friend,"_ the Ringmaster hissed at him and Lee was surprised to see no fear in him, only hatred and bitter pride. _"By treason you have lived and by treason you will die! In the hour of your greatest need, you will find yourself alone and you will remember why you have no one watching you back!"_

"_It is power that breeds friendships," _Heihachi replied. _"And I have no lack of men eager to look out for my interests! You give yourself too much credit. You are nothing to me."_

He turned towards Lee and kissed his soft, silver hair.

"_Go on, child,"_ he said in his ear. _"Pull the trigger and take your revenge!"_

Lee remembered the revulsion, the anger and the hate. He remembered the white, hot, searing need to do it; he remembered the gratitude and the elation. He remembered squeezing the trigger until he felt it click. The shot was deafening and it threw him back, but the firm hold of Heihachi's arms cushioned his fall. The blood was red and warm as it sprayed all over his face and into his mouth.

The repulsive taste of it made him sick.

"_Good boy,"_ Heihachi said with pride. He caught him as his strength gave out and he nearly passed out in his arms. The gun slipped out of his weak fingers and landed with a thud on to the bloody sand.

"_Take care of the rest," _Heihachi told his men, adjusting his hold on him and carrying him away. As they left, Lee heard the automatic rifles roaring over the brief cries of people still left inside. He wrapped his arms firmly around his saviour's neck and shivered in his arms.

"_Rejoice, child,"_ Heihachi told him as he took him back to the car. _"The men who brought you to harm are now no more and their deaths were far more merciful than the one that they would have given you."_

"_Thank you,"_ Lee said and kissed his cheek.

"_Am I forgiven now?"_ Heihachi asked, pleased by his response.

"_You are."_

"_And we shall never speak of this again?"_

"_Never,"_ Lee confirmed and cuddled closer against him. _"Never, never again."_

"_What am I to you?"_ Heihachi asked, stroking back his wild, silver hair.

"_Father,"_ Lee replied, knowing that that was what he wanted to hear. _"You are my father."_

"_Yes,"_ Heihachi said in satisfaction. _"I am your father and you are my son."_

Inside the car, he settled the boy's slender frame on to his lap and took out his cell phone, giving out curt orders in Japanese. He scrolled down the window and Lee watched as the paramilitary evacuated from the compound grounds. Monster jeeps drove by and they jumped in, lining up and driving away, seeming very busy and small from the distance.

As they cleared the perimeter, Heihachi gave the word and suddenly, the entire complex exploded. Lee cried out in shock and hid against him, frightened by the sheer magnitude of the noise.

The rising flames suddenly seemed very near and terrifying.

"_Don't be afraid, my child,"_ Heihachi said, kissing his hair. _"Look at it! Enjoy it! It is a wonderful sight, because death comes in such pretty colours!"_

***

Pretty colours, indeed. Lee grinned bitterly to himself. He didn't like the pretty colours at all, because all major changes in his life had come in the wake of big explosions, whether they were for better, or for worse.

A hesitant knock on the door snapped him out of his gloomy thoughts and he looked up.

Andersen. He had forgotten all about the man.

"What?" he said gruffly and the door opened with slow caution. His assistant peeked inside and concern was plastered all over his annoying, good-natured face.

"Sir, are you all right?"

"I am fine," Lee said coldly, fixing him with a glare. "But why are you still here?"

"I... I was worried," Andersen said, looking awkward and insecure. "You were shut up in here for so long, I thought..."

"You thought wrong," Lee cut him off. "As you can see, Mr. Andersen, I am still very much alive, so you can go away now."

Much to his infinite irritation, the young man failed to take his not so subtle hint and showed no sign of leaving. He set his jaw and planted his feet with determination that spoke of a total lack of sound judgement, or a sense of self preservation. He squeezed his way into the bathroom, standing there like a repentant schoolboy, with his hands behind his back.

"Sir... I am very sorry, sir," he began and Lee stared at him, unsure whether to be angry or amused.

"I should never... I would never... But when I came inside, your face was..." _wet_. Andersen swallowed, looking uncomfortable. "You looked so... And I just couldn't resist..."

He couldn't quite say it, but Lee did not need to stretch his imagination to fill in the blanks of his awkward confession. He knew all the signs of his ridiculous, indiscriminate infatuation because he'd experienced it more times than he cared to remember. He glared at him in silence, waiting to see just how far he would dare to take it, but Andersen did not need to be reminded of just how close he had come to peril already and he collected himself.

"I am sorry, sir," he said at last. "I was out of line and it will not happen again."

"I will ask you one more time, Mr. Andersen," Lee said icily. "Why are you here?

The assistant blinked at him, confused.

"Sorry, sir?"

"What do you want?" Lee asked again, accentuating each word as if he was speaking to a child that was taking painfully long to comprehend the speech of adults.

"Oh!" Andersen exclaimed and Lee rolled his eyes. He really did need to get someone more competent as soon as possible. "Well, I came to tell you that you should really take a look at the news."

Lee's eyes widened in surprise.

"The news?" he said. "Why?"

"G- Corporation is burning," Andersen said.

"What?" Lee exclaimed and jumped to attention. "Why?"

Andersen shrugged, looking worried.

"We don't know," he said. "There are rumours of a terrorist attack, but nobody has come on record and confirmed anything. CNN is covering it, but they have nothing concrete. Japan would not allow US helicopters anywhere near the place and their own stations aren't reporting any of it! Our crews are filming from international waters, but the flames are... huge!"

"Oh, for the love of... Get out of my way!" Lee pushed past him irritably and back in his room, he hurriedly reached for the remote. The sprawling, plasma screen lit up at once to a dim ball of orange in the midst of infinite black. The camera was too far away for anything even resembling a clear visual, but it did not take much of an imagination to understand just how big that fire was. The frantic, excited reporter was talking quickly. She was gesticulating with her hands as the wind whipped her hair, and Lee felt his blood run cold.

"What did our people in G- Corp. have to say?" he asked.

"Ah... we cannot reach them sir," Andersen said and Lee looked at him sharply.

The young man took a step back, staring at the floor guiltily.

"I am sure that they are all right and that they will contact us soon," he added hurriedly. "With all the chaos and mayhem, they probably just..."

He trailed away into silence under Lee's disapproving scowl.

"My people do not 'just' anything!" he said curtly. "Something has happened to them."

His sharp eyes narrowed and focused on the TV screen. His hand curled under his chin as he grimly processed the vague information. The white, sinuous cat appeared soundlessly from somewhere and Andersen jumped back in fright as the long, hairy tail touched his legs. The cat turned away from him with visible disdain and rubbed her head against the silk of Lee's pyjamas, meowing for attention.

He picked her up and cradled her to his chest, listening to her purr and letting it soothe his unorganised thoughts.

"Sir," Andersen questioned carefully. "Does this affect our merger with the G- Corporation?"

Lee's eyes narrowed as he thought about it. There was something going on and he didn't know what it was. He had never been the type to run from anything, especially not from a blatant provocation. He had to get to the bottom of this, no matter what the cost.

"No," he said firmly. "It doesn't. The merger will go on as planned."


	11. Consequences I

Title: Ultimate Hate 11/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Note: I thought that I should mention that I have done a pretty significant edit to the last three chapters and ironed out a lot of glitches in the writing itself. The text still says more or less the same, but the flow is now somewhat smoother than it used to be!

Part 11

Senn woke up to a cool, gentle hand on his forehead.

"Sir," a soft, female voice called. "Sir, wake up!"

Sick with exhaustion, he opened his eyes to look straight at the pale, tired face of his personal assistant. She wore no make-up and her normally impeccable, dark hair was escaping from her dishevelled bun.

"He is calling for you," she said and the sympathy was evident in her voice. "Do not make him wait."

Despair. Senn had become so familiar with it, that he barely heeded it anymore when the guilt struck hard, biting deep at the core of his humanity. He knew that soon, he would stop feeling completely and he grieved for the loss.

He looked out through the window and saw that it was still day outside, even though the afternoon was already beginning its descent towards twilight. Hours. It was mere hours since he had fallen asleep and it felt like barely seconds. He was unsure if he would be able to get up and function, but he had to heed Kazuya's summons.

"Is the preliminary report finished?" he asked and she nodded.

"It is ready, sir," she said. "I have also prepared a clean outfit for you. You cannot go in front of him in... This."

Senn followed her gaze down his chest, to see the white shirt smeared in blood, grime and soot.

That alone was a testament to how tired he was, to have fallen asleep with all that filth clinging to him, when he was normally so obsessively fastidious and groomed. The stench of death, sweat and fear had sunk deep, into the very pores of his skin, and he doubted that even hours of hot water and soap would do him any good.

Once again, he'd been put in charge of retrieving the dead bodies of his co-workers. Once again, he had seen things he'd held dear crumble into ash. Kazuya Mishima killed indiscriminately, not caring whom he sacrificed in his madness and once again, Senn was forced clean up the mess, or face the consequences of an angry demon's wrath.

"Thank you, Ayano," he told her wearily and went to the bathroom, taking the clean clothes with him. He shut the door firmly and leaned on to the sink with a sigh. When he looked into the mirror, his own face was strange to him, as if it had aged ten years in one night. His cheeks were sunken and eyes rimmed with dark circles. He grimaced when he ran his palm over his jaw and discovered the rough stubble of a sparse beard. Traces of grey prematurely streaked his dark hair and he knew that it was the product of constant stress rather than of advancing age. Unfortunately, the facts in his birth certificate had fallen into discord with his reality a long time ago and it seemed like an eternity since he'd last been aware that he was still young.

He washed himself quickly and watched the filth swivel down the drain in a murky whirlpool, until the water became clear once more, but he knew that he would never be clean again.

Kazuya Mishima had defiled him to the core and he was rotting on the inside from the evil he had infused him with. There would be no redemption for him, because he had obviously already decayed beyond salvation, to have been able to stand by and watch when the Devil had ordered the survivors of his rampage to be placed under arrest.

Senn had said nothing. He'd done nothing, except listen helplessly to the frightened wails of desperate people when Kazuya had brought in his military to conduct a purge of all eyewitnesses, rounding up anyone who may have seen him take on his supernatural form.

Dozens of innocent people. Receptionists. Cleaners. Security guards.

It had been night time and most of the workers had gone home already, or the numbers of those lost as collateral damage would have been much higher. The backbone of G-Corp's administration had fortunately remained intact, which was a poor comfort. The fact that the corporation could resume its functions almost immediately, as if nothing had happened, was the final monument to the injustice that had befallen its own people, within its very walls.

Senn's fingers shook as he buttoned up his shirt and he ground his teeth in frustration. His head swam and his stomach rebelled at his every move, but he had no time for weakness. The clean clothes felt good, even though the quick wash-up was hardly an adequate replacement for the hot shower that he craved for to the very marrow of his bones. He almost looked presentable in the smart, ironed suit and it was welcome, because it hinted at some semblance of returning to normality.

His assistant was waiting for him when he came out, with a stack files balanced in her hands.

"Here you go, sir," she said, handing them over, "the preliminary estimate of the damage and the approximation of costs to replace the building. The compensation which should be paid to the families of the deceased is included."

Senn opened up the one on top and glanced over the contents quickly.

"Thank you, Ayano," he said. "Are there any news that I should be aware of?"

"The fire has been put out," she said. "The site is secured, but the ruins are still smouldering. It is expected that the crews will start clearing them early tomorrow."

"That is good to know," he said. "Anything else?"

She hesitated and when he looked up at her, his heart sank with dire premonition.

"What?"

"Violet Systems were on the phone again," she said timidly. "They cannot get in touch with their people. They are worried and I didn't know what to tell them. Again."

Senn scowled. He was sick to his stomach when he remembered Violet Systems. Their people had come from the USA to work on the preparations for the merger and in the wake of last night's disaster, Kazuya had taken the opportunity to have each and every single one of them transported into lockup, regardless of whether they had been on the scene or not. He had even dragged men out of their beds; scientists, economists and engineers, who were unsuspecting of any evil afoot, and tossed them behind bars, unaffected by their confusion and demands for explanations.

"Tell them nothing," he said curtly. "I will talk to Mr. Mishima about it. He will tell us what we are supposed to say."

"Yes, sir," she said and came close, fixing his tie with her small, slender hands. She looked into his eyes and once again, he clearly read the pity on her face. "Good luck with him, sir," she added in a whisper, as if afraid that it would be heard.

He forced himself to smile for her, but it offered no reassurance, because the result of his attempt at comfort was a wan and faded thing. He touched her cheek briefly with the back of his hand.

"It will be fine," he said, but she knew that his words were a lie and that he was the first among those who did not believe them.

Senn's offices were right under the top floors that Kazuya himself occupied and nauseous, he entered the slick, soundless elevator, pressing the button that indicated up.

Predictably, G-Corporation's tallest, most impressive building had not been its ruined headquarters, where the public aspects of their business were conducted, but the tower that Kazuya had constructed and appropriated for his own, private use. It rose tall and intimidating over the urban landscape of steel, glass and asphalt, sheltered by a steep, natural wall of grey, jagged rock that loomed above it and overlooked all of their spaces, offices and labs. The architecture was incorporated into the cliff itself, appearing massive, strong and protected.

Built according to Kazuya's own design, it mirrored him perfectly. Strict and frugal in its lines, it remained dark, big and foreboding. It was visible at all times, from every corner of their grounds. At night, it lit up in yellow and red, like an evil eye, reminding everyone of its presence and what it signified.

G- Corp's compounds were a virtual city and they were large, secluded and self-sufficient. The layout sprawled wide, with its back to the rising mountain and the tall, concrete walls surrounding its property, where there was no natural obstacle to keep it sheltered, were strongly reminiscent of a fortified stronghold. It burrowed deep under layers of stone, to form a vast, underground complex that stretched for miles on end, until its tunnels broke out on to the shore beyond, on the other side of the province.

Everything between the G-Corp's base and the harbour on the other side of the geological barrier also belonged to the conglomerate. It encompassed a huge stretch of both exploited grounds and untouched nature, including fields, woods and hills, with vast resources and energetic potential in minerals, water and gas. They were connected to the rest of civilisation by sea, land and air. The highways, railways and landings that G-Corporation had funded primarily for their own interests had benefited the whole of Japan almost as an afterthought, because all of them were very susceptible to the absolutistic will at the core of G-Corporation's management. The country itself was still not aware that the entire infrastructure Kazuya had produced from the shadows was nothing but a bridge that could be opened and closed at the whim of an autocratic agenda that had yet to be revealed. That was the price that Japan would have to pay for allowing G-Corp to nurture its independence and self-sufficiency, which had turned it into the monster that it was now.

G-Corporation had launched this decade-long project before Senn's time, but standing on the brink of its completion, he was in the position to see the results, which were only an interlude for even bigger things to come. It was masterminded by Kazuya himself, when he'd been pulled from the volcano and brought back to life by gruesome ritual and sacrifice that should never have been allowed to happen. G-Corporation's ruling body at the time had been seduced into supporting Kazuya's plans by his promise of wealth and they had paid for their greed with their own blood. There was only one lord at the root of G-Corporation's incredible power now.

Senn grinned bitterly when he thought of those who had been the first to fall prey to the consequence of their devastating mistakes. One did not make deals with the Devil and expect to come out on the winning end of the bargain.

The ride up was too short. The doors slid open to reveal a great, empty, with only a big, ornate chair that resembled a throne at its far end. It stood on a raised platform which could only be reached by a flight of wide, steep stairs, elevating the man who sat upon it from all those who approached him for audience. The walls facing outwards from the mountain were massive and heavy, but generously perforated by huge, decorative, floor to ceiling windows that played with light in a way that gave the entire setting a monumental, gothic air.

The room was veiled from the late afternoon by drawn blinds, yet the bright, persistent sunlight broke in through the cracks and fell in parallel lines in front of Kazuya's dim, lurking form, shrouding him even further in shadow and obscurity. Senn blinked, forcing his eyes to adjust to the scarce light and when they focused, he balked in terror, unable to make his feet move forward.

Two massive dogs lay at Kazuya's feet. As soon as they caught his scent, they lunged towards him, erupting in growls, howls and barking, even though the heavy collars around their thick necks were connected to chains and bolted into the floor. Paralysed by terror, Senn forget to breathe when faced by the overwhelming threat they emanated. His heart beat like mad and beads of sweat formed on his temples as his panic threatened him with asphyxiation.

Kazuya looked up and his nostrils widened to take in the scent of his fear. His senses were enhanced like those of a beast and he could smell lies and weaknesses on people, so there was no use pretending in front of him, even if Senn had been capable of an attempt at deception. He sneered with visible disdain, but in a rare gesture of complacence and accommodation, he barked out a curt, clear order to the dogs. The animals settled down at once, but even though they made no further threats against the intruder, they still keened restlessly, torn between the frustration at being held back and their desire to please.

Kazuya's one eye glowed very red from the shadows, waiting for him to approach, and Senn made an effort to breathe, reminding himself that the dogs were the lesser of the two evils he was walking towards. He swallowed and took several reluctant steps forward, ignoring his nausea and the savage beating of his frightened heart.

The dogs bared their pure, white teeth at him when he came near and he shuddered, closing his eyes for a moment to regain his bearing. They looked like dogs, but they were so much more, just like the man who kept them looked human, but was something else entirely. They might have had Rottweilers in their ancestry, judging from their broad heads and stocky, stalwart anatomy, but they were so much larger than any dog that Senn had ever seen! Their short, black coats were shiny and rich, with clear, defined tan markings around the snouts and under their bellies. Their ears and tails were cropped, giving them a more streamlined, yet more ferocious look and their dark, round eyes glistened with fever and malice.

These were no mere pets, but creatures of mayhem and darkness. They were bloodthirsty, deadly and dangerous. Their powerful jaws were certain death, with long teeth that gripped, ripped and destroyed. They crushed through flesh and bone, while the dog gorged itself upon blood and their attack was hopeless for the victim. Senn had seen them take down grown men before, without so much as making an effort.

The sheer abundance of strength that these creatures possessed was humbling and very visible in their broad, muscled limbs. Their ferocious temper, coupled with a total lack of fear, made for an impressive display of natural viciousness and instilled terror wherever they passed. Bred for destruction, they were the perfect war animals and their blind loyalty to only one master made them a threat to every other living thing that breathed in their proximity.

When he finally made it to the steps in front of the pedestal, Senn saw the dogs clearly for the first time and realised that Kazuya was feeding them fresh meat with his bare hands. He had a large, silver dish to his right, filled to the brim with red, slick pieces of raw flesh and they made wet sounds when he scooped them up, letting the thick blood drip all over the floor, where it was eagerly lapped up as soon as it hit the grey stone. The dogs wagged their tails and swallowed his gifts eagerly in a mess of yelps and slobbering. Licking his hands in gratitude, they whined their devotion and Kazuya smiled at them with satisfaction.

Senn pressed his hand over his mouth and turned away in an effort to hold the meagre contents of his stomach down, but with his nose filled with the dense, overpowering scent of fresh blood, it was a hopeless battle. He doubled over and gave in to his urge to vomit, throwing up all over the clean, bare floor. The bitter stench of bile made his nausea worse and his head spun miserably.

Seemingly unaffected by his distress, Kazuya looked straight at him as he crouched there, trembling, with his head lowered in shame.

"Today, if you please, Mr. Secretary," he said and his deep, deadly voice echoed through the vast, reverberating emptiness of the hall.


	12. Consequences II

Title: Ultimate Hate 12/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Part 12

The dogs growled, lurking between their master's legs, but they made no other obvious signs of aggression, pacified by threat of his displeasure.

Sweat dripped down Senn's nape and under the collar of his shirt. He knew that the demon could smell his terror on him, perhaps taking some twisted pleasure in tormenting him like this, because it was in the creature's sadistic nature to feed on the misery of others and Kazuya had always revelled in the obvious fear of those before him.

"Yes, my lord," Senn responded hoarsely, reminding himself that the dogs were chained. No matter how strong, they still couldn't pull out the bolts holding them in place, unless they were released intentionally and he knew that if Kazuya wanted to hurt him, he could do far worse things than letting his dogs tear him to pieces, because he had done them to him already.

Kazuya's cruelty and his punishments remained raw and vibrant in his memory, regardless of the passing time. If given the choice of which monster's rage he'd rather face, Senn would have definitely picked the dogs over their master at any time. Pulling himself together, he gathered up his files and rose gracefully to his feet, dusting off his pristine, elegant suit, even though he couldn't stop shaking, no matter how hard he tried.

"Do you have the damage report ready for me?" Kazuya asked.

The scars on his face were very wicked in the contrast of light and shadow. The signs of his paranormal transformation were gone from his body and with the exception of his red, burning eye, he appeared very human. He looked clean and almost civilised, which happened rarely when the Devil gene was upon him, but this time it appeared as if he had made the effort to wash himself and to dress, even though the latter had been abandoned half-way.

He wore smart, grey pants that seemed to belong to a suit, but he remained barefoot, with the belt around his waist undone. In a concession to neatness, his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, apparently to avoid getting blood on the white, pristine shirt. He had not bothered to tuck in and it was only partially buttoned up, revealing a vast expanse of his scarred, muscled chest. A tie was draped loosely around his neck as if he had intended to put it on, but never gotten around to actually doing it.

"Yes, my lord," Senn replied, horrified by how little control he had over his shaking voice. "The preliminary report is finished. The final numbers will not be available until the crews clear the rubble."

Kazuya seemed collected and calm, with no visible trace of the devastating rage that had possessed him only hours ago, but when he spoke, there was something tired in the tone of his voice; something injured, vulnerable and raw, which signalled for caution, because there was no knowing what could trigger him to explode next.

"Preliminary will do just fine," he said and reached into the bowl by his side, taking out a large piece of red, slimy meat and ripping it in two. Senn looked away and swallowed, trying in vain to moisten his dry lips. He had to keep talking to distract himself from the sickening sight in front of him.

"The administrative headquarters of G- Corporation have been completely obliterated in the explosion," he said, "but the fires were stopped before they reached the other departments. We lost the main computer, but the backups were all updated, so the data itself is intact. We were especially lucky that the laboratories were preserved. If the oxygen pipes had caught fire, the damage would have been devastating. Unfortunately, the estimated costs of cleaning and reconstruction are still going to be in billions."

Kazuya rolled his eyes, unimpressed. "What about casualties?" he asked.

Senn shuddered. "So far, we have recorded thirty nine of the staff members who were on duty last night as missing," he said. "It is presumed that all of them were trapped in the building when it collapsed and consequently killed. We do not have the information about who else might have been inside at the time."

"Thirty nine?" Kazuya tilted his head, sounding... disappointed. "Only thirty nine?"

"Like I said, we do not know who else may have been in the building at the time and it is unlikely that even with the clearing of the rubble, we'll be able to come up with the exact number," Senn said, confused by his tone. "Most of the victims trapped inside were likely to have been vaporised during the explosion and will never be identified! We were fortunate that it was night, or the death toll would have been far worse."

"Some fortune that is," Kazuya grumbled darkly.

"My lord... I don't understand."

"I can hardly make a statement with thirty nine, now can I, Mr. Secretary?"

"Statement, Sir?"

Kazuya stood up from his seat and glared down at him, as if irritated because he had to explain something so obvious. He picked up a pitcher of water and poured it over his hands, washing off the blood. Senn felt sick all over again as he watched the crimson stream spill into the basin, but soon enough, the water ran clear once more, even though the nauseating smell still permeated the air.

"The world is demanding to know what happened here last night!" Kazuya said with easy sarcasm that clearly stated exactly what he thought of the rights of the general public to be promptly and accurately informed. "We need to give them an explanation."

Senn was almost relieved to hear that, but he knew better.

"That... that would be good," he said carefully. "We are besieged by reporters. I have had the prime minister of Japan himself on the phone the whole day. Not to mention the ministries of defence of more than three dozen countries that we cannot afford to ignore! The longer this goes on unresolved, the more wary they are going to become. We need to issue a statement as soon as possible, if we are going to salvage the mess."

"We shall hold a press conference!" Kazuya declared, picking up a clean towel and wiping his hands.

"And tell them what?" Senn asked suspiciously. He had a feeling that he wasn't going to like the answer.

"That we were victims of a terrorist attack," Kazuya replied.

"Terrorist attack?" Senn gaped. "What... What terrorist attack?"

"The one perpetrated by the Mishima Zaibatsu," Kazuya said.

"But... but that isn't true!"

"There is a fine line between truth and lies, Mr. Secretary," Kazuya said coldly and crouched down to pet his dogs. "The difference is only in who believes them! What we perceive as right or wrong is relative, and very dependent on whose needs it serves to promote it as such! You should know that! You built your career on it, after all!"

Senn closed his eyes and said nothing in his defence, because there was nothing to say.

"But... but why are we doing this?" he asked.

"Because I need a reason to attack _them_!" Kazuya hissed. Sensing his ill temper, the dogs turned towards Senn and growled. "This will give me the excuse I need to bring my military out into the open!"

"But, sir..." Senn stared at him, horrified by what he was implying. "That could cause an armed conflict of enormous proportions!"

Kazuya raised an eyebrow at him.

"You mean like... a war?" he mocked and Senn's face drained of all blood. "Yes, Mr. Secretary! That would be the point!"

"The Mishima Zaibatsu will never take responsibility for it," Senn replied softly. "They will deny perpetrating the attack."

"They can deny it all they want!" Kazuya smirked. "There is no use in affirming something that nobody believes! Thanks to the... activities put in motion by my beloved son, the sympathies of the world are on our side! The media will report whatever we tell them, because it suits their own purposes for the general public to believe what we too want them to believe! Many, many people lost a lot of profit, thanks to the Zaibatsu and that's all that your precious truth amounts to, really! A calculation. There is your civilisation for you, an instrument of greed, manipulation and politics, which is why I fully intend to cure humanity of these shortcomings! A little chaos will do it good!"

Senn gripped the files in his arms, shivering visibly.

"Will... will you be holding the conference yourself, sir?" he asked hoarsely, barely making his throat work to force out the words.

"No," Kazuya declared. "You will be! It is not yet time for me to appear publically. Besides..." he took Senn in from head to toe and smiled wickedly. "You are more... presentable, and in the temporary absence of the ambassador I would prefer, you will have to serve! We wouldn't want to scare all those precious, sensitive souls into turning against us, now would we?"

"No, sir," Senn whispered.

"But I need more casualties," Kazuya mused, scratching the belly of one of his dogs and putting his arm around the other when it propped itself up on to its hind legs to lick his face. "Thirty nine isn't a particularly gripping figure. It is hardly a number that will warrant a declaration of war."

"Should we lie about that too, my lord?"

"Hn." Kazuya scowled. "Lying is such a bad word for it. Let's call it... embellishing the facts."

"The number of employees in the G- Corporation headquarters is public information. It will be easy to prove or disprove."

"And if we count the prisoners?

Senn blinked

"Prisoners, sir?"

"Yes. The witnesses to last night's events that I still haven't decided what to do with and who I have pleasantly accommodated under my building, for the time being.

"Umm... I cannot be certain sir." Senn whispered

Kazuya glared at him for the disobedience, knowing very well that the exact number was ingrained in his mind and that it would torture him with nightmares for years to come, but that he did not want to say it out aloud.

"Try anyway, Mr. Secretary," he drawled, "lest I be tempted to add your name to the casualty list too."

Senn swallowed the lump in his throat, knowing better than to provoke him further.

"Two hundred and forty two," he said at last.

"Good. That is good. Much better than your previous estimate," Kazuya smiled, mocking his distress. "It is such a nice number too! A catchy one, which is good, because we will be using it a lot! It's a pity, though, that we have only one ruined building to show for... We would have had a much more gripping image to work with, if the labs had blown up too!"

Senn closed his eyes, unable to look at him.

"Speaking of the prisoners, sir," he began. "I've had people from Violet Systems on hold the whole morning."

"Violet Systems?" Kazuya said sharply, lifting his head in attention at the mention of the name.

"Yes," Senn said. "You've had all of their people... removed this morning. The company is worried. They want to know why they cannot get in touch with them. The US Department of Defence is backing them up. Violet Systems is their biggest supplier of weapons and they are not impressed by what could be perceived as an attack on their people."

"What did you tell them?"

"Nothing," Senn said. "I did not know what to say."

"Good. That is good. The merger with Violet Systems cannot be compromised."

"But what shall I tell them, my lord?"

"Tell them that their people perished in the fire!" Kazuya said easily. "They were unfortunate victims; caught in the wrong place at the wrong time! It won't be far from the truth anyway. We'll offer their families condolences and compensation, which should put an end to it."

"Sir... is that really necessary?" Senn dared to ask and his voice was nearly soundless. This was a death sentence to them all and though he had suspected it before, it was now made official.

"Of course it is necessary!" Kazuya barked angrily. "I cannot have Lee's little spies running around here at a time like this!"

"Lee's... spies?" Senn repeated, aghast.

"It has taken me... years to find him," Kazuya closed his eyes and his face twisted in something that nearly resembled... pain. "Years to lure him this close! Lee is clever. Lee is cautious and if only one of his rats was to report back to him with even a hint of what really went on here last night, he would go into hiding at once! He is at home in the USA and my influence there is... not what I would like it to be. I would not be able to ferret him out again! At least, not before I lay the entire fucking continent to waste, which could take me ages and I... I cannot wait any more. He has been away from me for far too long."

"My lord..." Senn stared at him in mortification. "Are we merging with Lee's company, because you are hoping to find him there?"

"Violet Systems is not _his_ company!" Kazuya growled and the dogs bared their long, white teeth at him, backing up his aggression. "It belongs to me, along with that sneaky, treacherous little bastard who has stolen and appropriated it for his own! I will have both of them back right now, or I will see to it that the world burns, until I do! And then, I will make damn sure that he never leaves me again."

"My lord, you do realise that Lee Chaolan has not been sighted for almost two decades now?" Senn asked carefully. "Even though the Violet Systems continue to use his name, there is no evidence that he is still alive!"

Kazuya roared and rose to his feet. The dogs went wild, barking viciously and lunging forward in spite of the chains. Kazuya reached for something and threw it towards him. Abused paper rustled as it flew through the air and Senn reflexively took a step back, dropping his files in a clumsy attempt to catch the flailing thing.

"Here is your bloody evidence!" Kazuya sneered angrily and both of his eyes flared very red. "Oh, he has been _sighted_, all right! He has been sighted by half of the fucking _planet_!"

Senn backed away from him in horror and looked down at the paper in his hand, noting that it was a brand new copy of the tabloid he had seen last night.

Kazuya made his way down the stairs with slow, deliberate steps.

"And speaking of my wayward brother, Mr. Secretary," he hissed, "why don't I hear any sounds of construction above me?"

White faced and wide eyed, Senn blinked at him.

"My lord... in the light of recent... events, we have recalled all the workers and employed them at the site of the explosion as a matter of priority, providing relief for..."

"No!" Kazuya yelled at him and the very walls seemed to shake from the power of his voice. "No! That is not acceptable! Bring them back at once! There is no greater priority to me than this! The reconstruction must go on as planned! Do you hear me? It must go on! The apartment has to be ready before the merger takes place!"


	13. Consequences III

Title: Ultimate Hate 13/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Part 13

Still reeling from his encounter with Kazuya, Senn slammed the files on to a pile of other unfinished work and sat down at his computer. He was shivering all over.

Fighting his blurry vision, he clicked through the extensive data they kept on the Violet Systems, but his attention was divided between the screen and the front page of the magazine that Kazuya had thrown at him. The preliminary contract for the upcoming merger sat on his desk. The clauses, terms and obligations printed within were seemingly harmless and straightforward, but Senn could not help a sense of foreboding every time the folder caught his eye.

Violet Systems. Violet. Purple.

It was the hairstyle of the man in the tabloid that was setting off the alarms in his head. The bright, outlandish colour was too outrageous to be common and he could have sworn that he had seen it already. An echo of a memory teased him, but he could not quite put his finger on it. There was too much purple around him for his liking and he was sure that he had come across it before, just not in the context of Lee Chaolan. For him, that name had never been more than a distant fact, derived from the compulsory info search on Kazuya. He was a ghost from a time before him and as such, he had never seriously taken part in any of Senn's calculations, until the Devil's unhealthy obsession had begun to take its toll in human lives, on his watch.

Lee had founded the Violet Systems, but Senn had never realised that he was the reason why the creature he served was so interested in the merger with them. The company was the leading weapons manufacturer in the USA and some of their technology in robotics was frighteningly advanced, so he had always assumed that this was what Kazuya was after. Lee himself had never even occurred to Senn and he was dismayed to discover not only how superficial his grasp on the subject in question was, but also how hard it was to come up with any depth on someone who had lived his life with such obvious flare.

Lee distracted the eye from important things with the masks he wore and the fact that the most obviously distinctive thing about him were his looks didn't help. He truly was, for the lack of better description, simply beautiful. Browsing through the old recordings that still preserved his image, Senn found himself quite distracted and subconsciously annoyed by the abundance of glaring accessories on him. They detracted so much from his natural beauty, but Senn grinned as he understood his trick. While most people turned to makeup to enhance their appearance, Lee seemed to use it to hide.

His carefully orchestrated sense of flashy, outrageous style made him splendid and very visible, but it pushed the outfit to the front and concealed the person underneath. It seemed as if he had become a slave of high fashion, because he actually preferred to blend in with the shallow generalisation of consumerism, rather than to be noticed for something else. The majority of newspaper clippings revolved around his dress and appearance, while a much smaller percentage covered all other, far more important aspects of his life. There were many pictures of him where he was seen wearing lip gloss and eyeliner, in spite of the fact that his flawless beauty and obvious youth needed no assistance to be admired. He preferred to dye his hair in every glaring shade imaginable, rather than to leave it its natural, curious white. Black, red, orange and green were his favourite colours for this and he played with them easily, with an almost mocking glee.

He hid in the spotlight, generating an outburst of opinion wherever he showed his face, but even though he was coveted and adored, he still remained very isolated, mysterious and alone. The legacy of the Mishima power and influence hovered over him like a dark cloud and prohibited him from having a life away from its shadow, which was both a privilege and a curse.

Only the rare footage where Lee was shown accompanied by Heihachi showed his strange, silver hair visible. It seemed as if the old Mishima did not approve of his son's theatrics and in his father's presence, Lee's attire became much simpler and more elegant, giving him a cool, noble and sophisticated look. Heihachi displayed a twisted sort of pride in his son's beauty, which was more like something that an eccentric owner would feel for a fine race horse than a father for his child, but Lee obeyed him nonetheless and it was unclear whether this was out of respect, or simply out of fear.

Heihachi had ample reason to show him off. Even if he'd had no other talents except for his looks, Lee would still have been considered extraordinarily blessed, but this was hardly his only quality. Growing up in the Mishima household had turned him into a brilliant fighter, but on that field, he'd sadly remained in the shadow of his frighteningly powerful, yet far less presentable brother.

Senn had seen the old tournament videos of him before. Ridiculously flexible and impeccably trained, in the ring, Lee was a sight to behold. He was a visual spectacle of speed, acrobatics and skill. While the rest of his family favoured an enhanced, extremely powerful form of karate, he practised Chinese martial arts as an echo of his original birthright. Unlike the typical Mishima display of raw power and destruction, Lee's graceful, elaborate style turned even violence into a thing of beauty and awe.

Senn randomly played a video from his collection and watched the audience explode with adoration when Lee entered the arena. He looked very young there, no more than twenty years or so, and when he smiled, his fans went wild with approval. He performed a complicated combination of high kicks and jumps for them and received an ovation for his efforts.

The atmosphere was charged with adrenaline and madness and Senn realised that even on screen, the crowd, the noise and overall feral, animalistic frenzy that inevitably accompanied these things was too much for him to watch. The scene dragged up memories that did not want to relive and he could not push them down, especially since barely an hour had passed since he had shamefully thrown up all over Kazuya's floor again, right in front of him, just like he had done that first time when he had seen him fight up close, with a real person of flesh and blood, in front of a crazed audience of onlookers.

The recollection was overwhelming and feeling his nausea return, Senn had to stop the video, because the violence of it triggered things within him that were best left alone. Desperate for a distraction before the residual horror got the better of him, he closed the entire directory and switched to another one, whose label promised less dramatic footage.

Years ago, he had made the mistake of accepting Kazuya's invitation to accompany him to one of those underground, unofficial tournaments which had absolutely no rules and safety regulations. Naked flesh was pitted against beasts, weapons and machines, so that the contestants fought not only other men, but also impossible odds, while the spectators cheered.

There was no love for Kazuya when he entered the ring and he did not ask for it, but the initial roars of antagonism and disapproval died down to silence quickly, almost as soon as the fight began. There was no flare to his powerful style. No need to please and to entertain. It was swift, cruel and merciless, as if he was taking revenge for all the dislike and revulsion that he had been met with. He refused to waste punches and finished his matches with no stunts and exhibition, departing from the ring almost as soon as he'd entered and leaving carnage behind.

Senn could never decide why Kazuya had wanted to take him there in the first place. His favourite choice was that the creature must have known how he would react to it and had done it just to torture him, but a nagging suspicion at the back of his mind had always whispered that this was not the whole sum of his motives. He'd gotten the vague, very brief impression that Kazuya had _wanted_ his company, almost as if in the midst of his all his solitude, he'd _needed_ someone by his side; someone who was close to him to show off for and to impress, and he'd found nobody but him. The very notion of it left Senn both bewildered and afraid, but if that had truly been Kazuya's intention, then he'd set himself up for extreme disappointment, because the only thing that Senn had gotten from the experience was a deep and lasting trauma.

Closing his eyes to rid himself of the nasty imagery, he picked a new video and was relieved to discover that it was indeed far tamer than the previous one, even if nowhere nearly as exciting.

Lee was giving an interview for a TV network, speaking fluent English with a heavy Japanese accent, which made his words hard to follow, unless one was very familiar with what he was talking about. He was explaining a genetic engineering project that the Zaibatsu was about to embark upon, with the goal to create the perfect war animal in the laboratories which Heihachi was funding all over America. The speech was technical and uninspiring, but Lee's melodious voice was pleasant to the ear, so Senn let it drone on in the background about the statistics and research as he trawled further.

Years ago, Lee had run the US-based research branch of the Mishima Zaibatsu, first serving under his father and afterwards, under his brother. Unlike Kazuya, who had quit high school during his senior year and run off abroad to cause mischief and further his education in things that would later spell doom for society, Lee had obtained a PhD in economics. Further honorary academic degrees in robotics and engineering came after his labs had made groundbreaking progress in the development of artificial memory, but he had always remained a shady and ambiguous figure on the academic scene. The humane goals that he'd started his work with had swiftly transformed into a materialistic nightmare. Unsurprisingly, his projects found their biggest implementation in the manufacture of weapons, turning the Mishima Zaibatsu into one of the greatest military forces in the world and leaving the original, utopian vision very far behind.

After Kazuya's death and Heihachi's return to power, Lee had broken off his relationship with his family and taken the relevant resources of his part of the corporation with him, letting the shell of the Mishima extension go bankrupt and die. From the ashes of the old company, he had funded the rising of the new one that specialised in robotics rather than in genetic engineering, and over the years, it had evolved into the vast empire of research and manufacture that they now knew as the Violet Systems.

Violet.

Senn frowned and said it under his breath over and over again, in the hopes that it would trigger his memory. He'd found the word masquerading as a name on a list of fighters competing in the fourth Tekken tournament and bemoaned the trauma of his previous experience with watching such things, that had prevented him from following Kazuya there. He sighed in frustration and leaned back in his chair, running his hands through his hair in an effort to combat the dull headache.

"Damn it," he cursed his exhaustion, almost ready to give in to despair.

But then his eye fell on to the merger contract and with the Iron Fist still fresh in his mind, a revelation suddenly hit him. Violet Systems had built and promoted a humanoid, fighting robot for that particular tournament and G- Corporation had funded its production!

Combot. Yes, that was the name! Combot!

And yes, that was where he had seen a purple haired man! He remembered it now. He had introduced himself over video-feed as the head of the engineering team that was building the prototype, during a board meeting that was supposed to decide whether to approve the funding for it or not! His presentation had seemed to border on science fiction more than on science and Senn nearly laughed as he remembered his totally unprofessional, purple outfit that had caused so many raised eyebrows in the gathering of stuffy, dried-up, old men who were in charge of deciding the fate of his project.

He had not given any of it more than a passing thought at the time, because Kazuya had gone into a fit of extreme agitation and distress right around then, acting out violently all over the place. Senn had never tied these incidents together, but when he thought about it now, Kazuya's explosion of madness had coincided perfectly with the meeting itself.

A cold thrill raced down his spine. In this new context, the link between the two became glaringly obvious and he remembered that when he'd gone to Kazuya, he had found him exhausted and surrendered to some old, resurrected pain.

"_What did you think of him?"_ the creature had asked quietly and Senn remembered it, because he had been so surprised to find that he'd cared about the Combot project, in the midst of all the other mayhem. He couldn't quite recall what he'd told him in response, except that it had been vaguely positive and that he'd been immensely relieved when the raging creature was soothed by his reply.

The next day, in a dramatic and horrifying act of absolute power, Kazuya had overruled the unanimous vote of the board to turn the project down. _"They have no vision left,"_ he had said before he'd killed them all, _"and as such, they have overstayed their welcome in this world!"_

Senn strained to remember more, but all he recalled was the purple hair. Most of the image was drowned out by the overwhelming stress of the time and the face itself was a blur, but he was still left with the general idea that the man behind Combot had been too young to be...

Could it be...? Was it even possible that...? No.

Senn's headache flared and he leaned forward eagerly, but it took him a moment to stabilise his shaking hand in order to operate the cursor.

"Combot, Combot, Combot..." he chanted under his breath as he searched for the folder. "Where the fuck are you, Combot?"

Holding his breath, he scrolled down to the file he was looking for and barely managed to contain his excitement as he clicked. A second of unbearable anticipation went by as the program started up and the movie began to play. It began with the hum of conversation and shuffling, while the board members took their seats. A parade of dead faces rustled through the provided files, commenting to one another in voices that were too low for the microphones to pick up the words.

He saw himself standing in a shadowed corner of the conference hall and unsurprisingly, his face was tired, worried and pale.

The vice president of the Applied Science and Research Department stood up, cleared his throat and called for silence. "Yes, yes, yes..." Senn growled impatiently, knowing that the long, rambling introduction was about to follow, so he skipped forward at random and let it play somewhere in the middle.

And the first thing that registered in his mind was the voice.

It was low, smooth and melodious and for a moment there, he thought that he'd made a mistake and played the Lee interview again, but that particular clip had run its course and stopped talking several minutes ago, even though it still remained open and partly hidden behind the other active windows.

Then there was that white, perfect face once more, smiling at him from the screen. The sense of déjà-vu hit him like a physical blow and it took him a moment to process the situation and realise that this time, the deep, seductive voice was speaking in clean, fluent Japanese.

"Oh, fuck..." Senn stared, not believing his eyes. He reached out and his trembling fingers hovered a centimetre above the screen in an attempt to physically reaffirm the outline of his cheekbones and jaw.

In spite of the face being half covered by large shades and an abundance of bright, unnaturally coloured hair, the likeness was so obvious, it was unsettling. Nauseous, he moved forward even closer, as if that would somehow allow him to see through this unexplainable phenomenon.


	14. Consequences IV

Title: Ultimate Hate 14/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Part 14

This was a trick. It had to be. In spite of the lack of an official confirmation, Lee Chaolan was long presumed dead, but even if he'd lived, there was no way that this could have been him. The Combot video was fairly recent, dating maybe two years back, which would have put Lee in his late forties then and the man that he was looking at was simply far too young.

Senn studied him carefully, looking for a sign of age; for wrinkles and scars, or at least a hint that he shaved like all normal, mature men do, but he saw nothing except smooth, perfect skin that would have put any woman to shame. He strained to find the telltale evidence of plastic surgery, or anything even suggesting a cosmetic treatment, but he found only fresh, obvious and unmarred youth.

Violet. This was Violet; charismatic, beautiful and daring, just like Lee Chaolan had been before him, in a time that predated him by a whole generation.

Senn could not understand it. Such a startling likeness wasn't possible, unless he was looking at the same man, but with a gap spanning twenty years between them, thinking like that was not a sane option.

There was no record of such a thing, but if Lee had had a son, Violet could have been the right age. He did not even have to be a direct descendant! A brother or even a cousin would have done just as well to offer explanation in the form of genetic resemblance, even if a result this perfect was something so unlikely, it was virtually impossible.

Senn leaned forward in his chair, not really listening to Violet's complicated elaboration on Combot's internal programming, while his mind reeled.

There had to be a rational explanation behind this. Unless they had cloned him when they had taken his dying body back to the USA, there was no possible way that Violet could be Lee. Then again, there were people who simply looked alike, for no good reason at all! Perhaps that was all it took; a similar bone structure, some surgical modifications and a little cosmetic enhancement to create results this good!

But why would anyone do something like that? He did not understand what purpose going to such lengths to imitate a man that was long dead could possibly serve, especially if one was then to go to the additional trouble of disguising himself enough, so that the resemblance would not be too visibly obvious. It did not make sense that the Violet Systems would use him as a puppet, to pose as Lee Chaolan himself. It was not logical to choose an impostor based on a man's likeness in youth, because that would not be fooling anyone! If Lee was indeed dead and the Violet Systems had had the need to conceal his demise for whatever political agenda they chose, then picking a more age-appropriate candidate would have been more beneficial. And more believable.

It was a macabre, disturbing line of thought, but it offered him relief, because if he was not an impostor, then Violet was at the very least a pawn, strategically placed for provocation. Kazuya thought that this man was his lost brother and he was already half-insane about it, so it was possible that he was the one at the bottom of this scheme perpetrated by the Violet Systems.

But Kazuya had not ever appeared publically at that time and his recovery and resurrection had been a reverently kept secret. Violet Systems couldn't... no, shouldn't have known about him and even if they had, what could they have possibly hoped to achieve by taunting a depraved monster with an image from his wrecked and ruined past?

Senn observed the sharply defined, beautiful face on his screen with growing agitation and antagonism. A member of the board rose from his seat and posed an obvious, almost sarcastic question and then the most disturbing thing happened. Violet smiled and Senn shuddered to the core of his being.

That smile was more than simple likeness. It was Lee smiling and there was no imitating that!

Violet answered the question with quiet complacence and masked his contempt with an almost mocking, patronising glee. His words produced laughter at the expense of the one who had tried to belittle him and though he seemed so young, he looked smug, knowing and mysterious, as if he was hiding all the secrets of the world behind his placid, flawless face and laughing covertly at the ignorance of mere human beings.

Beads of sweat broke out on Senn's forehead and shivering, he played back the video. He stared at it in a trance, unable to believe what he was seeing. He paused and switched between windows, rewinding the old Lee interview and stopping at a certain place.

The scene was almost identical. A reporter stood up from the crowd and posed a question and Lee smiled. The quality of the video was poorer, the language and the setting were different, but the situation was the same. His pure, white hair was tied back at his nape and he wore no shades over his dark, expressive eyes, yet there could be no doubt that this was the same face.

The attitude was the same and his timing and articulation were impeccable. The tilt of his head was unique and so was the way he pulled back his full, elegant lips to flash his bright, perfect teeth. The identical creases forming at the corners of his mouth could not be duplicated; not by actors, not by impostors and not by family. Then there was colour of his voice and the intonation when he spoke.

It was simply too much and Senn could not stand it any longer. He connected with his assistant over speed-dial.

"Ayano," he said. "I need a voice analysis and I need it now, I want the forensic s in my office at once!"

He had to get to the bottom of this, even though he was almost sure that he knew what their report would reveal and he dreaded the confirmation.

"Yes, sir," she chirped from the other side, but she also sounded tired and stressed. "Anything else, sir?"

"Yes," he said. "If you can find something for a headache, I would be most grateful. Something strong, mind you. At this point, I do not care if it is legal or not."

"I'll see what I can do, sir."

"And hurry up about it! Also, did you get a hold of what I asked for this morning?"

"Yes sir," she said. "It's on its way, sir."

"Good," Senn said. "Bring it to me as soon as they get here."

He cut the connection and closed his eyes for a moment. Bright splotches of colour danced behind his lids and his head swam. He wanted to sleep. He needed to sleep. Perhaps, if he got a proper rest, then all of this would start making sense.

When he looked at his computer again, his vision was blurred and it took him a long time to focus. He aligned the open videos next to each other and minimised the size of the display, until the faces of Violet and Lee stood side by side. He adjusted them to his liking and chose to press pause when both of them were at a certain, near identical angle, with the same tilt to the head and smiling that smug, satisfied smile.

The likeness was disconcerting. Could it be that Kazuya was right? Was it possible that both of these men were actually one and the same? Lee had been involved in a lot of strange and secretive research in his lifetime. Was it possible that he had discovered a way to slow down time and stop the aging process, so that he would remain eternally young?

Taking into consideration some of the mind-blowing breakthroughs that he had seen happen in Kazuya's labs, it was not that far of a stretch, but the thing that bothered Senn the most was that there simply was no comprehensive data available on Lee that wasn't at least almost two decades old. The last concrete, official facts that he'd managed to procure were dated eighteen years ago and they detailed the terrible accident which had happened on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, with horrifying consequences that had shocked the world.

Lee had been driving a ridiculously powerful machine under the influence and at an insane speed over frozen roads in Europe. He had gone there to party in the honour of his entry into the fourth decade of life, but judging from the drastic escalation of his behaviour that had followed his expulsion from Japan, it seemed like the event was more of a cause for despair than celebration to him.

There were two other people in the vehicle with him when it had crashed; a man and a woman, whose corpses were mauled beyond recognition by the time they were retrieved. Ironically, the thing that had initially saved Lee's life was his total lack of regard for international law, basic traffic regulations and most of all, his personal safety, because he had not been wearing a seatbelt when the speeding car had swivelled out of control.

He had flown through the windshield head-on as soon as he had hit the first obstacle, only seconds before the car itself had gone completely off of the road and continued to plummet down the sides of the canyon, to finally crash on jagged rock a kilometre below. After the flames from the explosion had died down, the only thing left behind was a wreck of twisted, mangled, molten iron and two disfigured, nearly vaporised skeletons trapped underneath.

Lee himself was flown to the ER by helicopter and with trepidation, Senn reached for a file on his desk that he had intended to pass on to Kazuya after the Devil gene within him stopped raging, but he was not sure whether that was such a good idea anymore.

It contained a copy of the last of Lee's medical records and they documented the extent of his injuries upon admittance in a hospital in Switzerland in full.

Senn glanced at the photos inside, but he had to look away. Lee's face was cut, bruised and swollen beyond recognition and he knew him only by his white, bloodied hair. His fall had ripped a large piece of skin from his left cheek, leaving the raw, bleeding muscle exposed, and such heedless destruction of his flawless beauty was both painful and horrific to contemplate.

Senn quickly turned to a textual explanation that was just as detailed, but less visual. Several pages worth of reading revealed that the superficial damage was the least of what had befallen him. They described trauma to his skull and the swelling of the brain which had left him in a coma. He'd suffered internal bleeding that had taken them hours to contain. Less pressing, but still terrible were at least a dozen broken bones and numerous injuries to all parts of his body.

But the most disastrous was the damage done to his fractured spine. Senn pulled out an enlarged photo of an x-ray that was included among the data and gazed at the critical point, helpfully circled in red with a thick, permanent marker. A man with such injuries should have died, but assuming that by some miracle he did survive, there was no way that he would have ever moved again.

Senn looked at the two identical faces, smiling at him from the computer screen. There was no way that they could possibly belong to the same man. Even if he had survived his accident, Lee would have remained paralysed and deformed, and death would have been the more merciful option for someone like him. Likewise, even if he'd managed to wake up from his coma, which was unlikely, he still would not have been able to avoid severe brain damage. It was unconceivable that he would even be able to function, let alone lead ground-breaking projects in robotic engineering and tease from a TV screen with his easy, seductive smiles, almost twenty years later.

As far as Senn knew, Lee was just an ordinary man. He had been adopted into the Mishima family which was, for the most part, hardly human, so Lee did not have the Devil blood in him like Kazuya, to heal and resurrect him from a certain death.

And the medical records did not lie.

The US had demanded Lee's extradition and obtained it only days after the accident, even thought he couldn't have possibly been in a condition stable enough for such a trip, but there was no proof of whether he had lived through it or not, unless one was to count in simple common sense.

A timid knock snapped him out of his contemplation and the door of the office opened to let his assistant inside.

"Sir, I have the footage you asked for," she told him.

"You do?" he said, reaching for it eagerly. "Give it here!"

She passed him a disk and he immediately inserted it into the drive, impatiently waiting for it to load.

"And your pills," she put a glass of water down on to the desk beside him, along with two little capsules, but Senn was no longer paying attention to her.

"Thank you, Ayano," he said and waved her away. He barely registered the door closing behind him as he stared at the picture playing out in front of his eyes.

The maddened, raving crowd cheered when the names of the fighters were announced and Senn almost failed contain himself as a familiar figure waltzed into the ring.

Violet. It was the same Violet from his conference and he barely stopped himself from jumping with excitement. He was even wearing the same outfit as the one that had been pasted all over the front page of that damn tabloid, so the lewd pictures had definitely come from that particular event!

Senn didn't know the first thing about martial arts. He had never trained himself and after Kazuya had introduced him to a whole new world of violence and death, even the vaguest hint of interest in it had evaporated, but his jaw dropped as he watched Violet move; tearing down his much larger, heavier opponent with a series of lightning-fast, high kicks. There was no catching him, no striking him, because he moved in a blur of motion and speed that was near impossible to follow.

If the video was dated twenty years ago, purple hair or not, there would have been no question in his mind that he was watching Lee Chaolan fight and filled with doubt and distress, he gave the x-ray another glance.

The fight was over in a matter of minutes, with Violet knocking his opponent down with a viper kick to his jaw. The man collapsed like a felled tree in a spectacular, humiliating display. His face hit the dirt and the impact of his remarkable weight resounded with a dull, sickening thud. The crowd exploded with adoration and Violet waved at them cheerfully, smiling, just like Lee had done so many years before him! He performed a series of elaborate jumps, which were nothing but sheer exhibitionism at work and the frenzied spectators rose to their feet in an ovation of approval. They loved his beauty, his skill and his charm and he bowed for them, basking in their adoration.

Lee, this was Lee and Senn did not care how it was possible, because the truth was that it did not even matter anymore. Kazuya believed that this was his brother and after seeing this, Senn could not blame him, because the likeness was truly surreal!

But whether Lee was alive or not, the fact remained that the Violet Systems were walking into a trap. The management of the company was oblivious to what lay in store for them once they merged and Senn was suddenly struck with a terrible dilemma.

Should he should warn this man; Violet, Lee, or whoever he was, because Kazuya's obsession with him was a powerful, frightening thing? Senn couldn't even begin to imagine what the Devil wanted from him, but judging from the reactions that he had already seen, it could be nothing good.

His consciousness writhed in torment, but his terror of what Kazuya would do to the rest of them, if Lee somehow managed to escape him, outweighed his fear of what the creature would do to his brother once he caught him again.

A great pain from Kazuya's past demanded closure. The Devil's madness kept the gaping wounds open in spite of passing time, and Senn was forced to acknowledge a grim fear that without Lee, this raging, supernatural being which was holding the resources of G-Corporation in the palm of his hand, may never again find his peace of mind.

And that would ultimately spell doom for them all.


	15. Consequences V

Title: Ultimate Hate 15/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Part 15

A brand new mattress that wasn't removed from its nylon packing lay on a lavish, randomly positioned frame. The late sunlight flooded in from the large, oval window and Kazuya fell back upon the bed, stretching out his long legs. He basked in the knowledge that soon, this room would no longer be empty. Soon, he would no longer be alone and that was a satisfying thought.

The sounds of construction were resuming all around him. They disrupted his silence, but the clatter was welcome and his mouth turned up in a grin, because it was only a matter of days now, before his most intimate dream finally took shape. The sun fell on his face and he squinted against it, yet he deliberately chose not to move away, because it reminded him of Lee and that was good.

Lee loved the sun. During the long summers of their youth, he would spend hours upon hours doing nothing except lying outside in the heat, which had annoyed the hell out of Kazuya, who'd never been able to contemplate the notion of being still in one place for very long. For him, those times remained lost behind a haze of madness and rage, which had found its outlet in violence. He'd lost count of the nameless bastards who'd had the misfortune to make a close acquaintance with his fist on Lee's account, because he was far from being the only one to notice that over those hot, indecent months, his brother's perfect skin took on golden hues that drove one to distraction.

Lee had never lacked admirers, but even though his stalkers belonged to both sexes, Kazuya had always been more threatened by the men than by the women, in spite of the fact that the ladies were far more frequent and numerous. Lee had never appeared publically with a man, because their father would have unleashed sheer hell for it, so whenever he'd embarked upon one of his more decadent adventures, he would have taken extraordinary care to cover his tracks.

But Kazuya had always known that there was a dark side to his brother's appetites.

With easy access to all the same circles, Kazuya would follow him underground as often as he could and when he got his hands on his secret lovers, he would vent, because once Lee's cravings became violent, vicious and intense, he'd always choose men to satisfy his baser needs.

"_What the fuck is wrong with you, asshole?"_ Lee would yell in frustration afterwards, while Kazuya massaged his bruised and bloodied knuckles. _"Quit screwing with my sex life, already! How the hell am I supposed to have any fun, when you keep terrorising all the viable candidates? At this rate, I will end up being alone and unsatisfied until I become all shrivelled up and old! And then nobody will want me, anyway!"_

As if there ever was a fat chance of that happening.

Kazuya scowled and ground his teeth when he remembered. His own effort to bash in his brother's sweet, delicate face and hasten that blessed moment when he would be unattractive to everyone had not ended very successfully, because there was no way that one could do serious damage to Lee, without taking serious damage in return.

He had always been certain that some major cosmic rules were broken on the day when something that pretty had managed to become so fucking lethal. An eternity of keeping him under a lock and key was not enough to make up for everything that Kazuya had suffered because of him and these latest, mortifying pictures were the ultimate proof of just how right he was! Because of Lee, he had never known peace- not even when he'd finally been able to take him into the fierce, possessive embrace of a lover. If anything, having him had only stoked the fires of his jealousy higher and made him writhe in misery at the thought of anyone else touching what should always have been only his.

Lee was fond of his freedom and Kazuya knew that he was going to put up a fight as soon as he tried to lay down the new, non-negotiable rules for him. It was not in Lee's nature to submit to anyone, especially not to him, because they were raised in rivalry and no amount of punishment that he had dealt out for defiance had ever been enough to convince the insufferable little tease that he was the one in charge. Kazuya wanted a new beginning for them, a better one, but if Lee chose to be stubborn with him this time around too, then he did not mind using force to cure him of his... misconceptions. Clearly, leaving Lee to his own devices was not an option and there simply was no other way to deal with such a hopeless, incorrigible flirt, except to remove him physically from all temptation. The very thought of having him there, in his stronghold, where he could watch over him and keep him under control, made him feel better and he did not doubt that Lee would break in time.

Kazuya already knew what path his brother's resistance would take, because he had dealt with it before. He had taken all precautions in the anticipation of the inevitable violence, trickery and rage, but he was afraid of Lee's despair, which was sure to come afterwards, as the ultimate weapon once everything else failed. Seeing him unhappy, especially if he was the cause, had always been Kazuya's great weakness, but Lee had only himself to blame for that. Kazuya had to be harsh and unrelenting to keep him by his side, because Lee had already walked out on him once and he couldn't trust him not to do it again.

Besides, he was sure that once Lee realised that he had no way out, he would have no choice but to surrender. He refused to feel guilty about what he was about to do, because none of this was his fault, anyway. He had never wanted a sibling imposed upon him and he knew that the only reason why Heihachi had brought him home in the first place, had been to show his biological son just how expandable and insignificant he was. Lee was an intruder, an enemy, and they were supposed to treat each other like that, but things were never that simple. All this pain was his punishment for letting that little traitor get so deep under his skin, instead of keeping the boundaries between them clear. This was the price he had to pay for wanting him, when he should have simply destroyed him long ago.

Kazuya's earliest memories were those of loss and abuse. After his grandfather's death and the castigation that Heihachi had dealt out because he'd openly grieved, he'd learned to stay away from people. His experience with the world of adults had consisted of his violent, abusive father, whom he'd hated and feared throughout his childhood, and those who'd witnessed what he'd do to him and pretend not to see, because they were also afraid. Cowards. They were all cowards and Kazuya had despised them, determined to wait out and endure his years of weakness, because he'd known that it couldn't last forever. He'd known that he too would become strong in time and take his revenge on everyone who had wronged him while he had been too young to defend himself. The Devil within him had promised him his vengeance.

Before Lee had come along, all his days had resembled one another, with only his father for company; an endless parade of silence, anger and despair. He'd developed no social skills whatsoever, because he'd been raised so outcast and alone, and even if he'd felt the desire for the friendship of other children, Heihachi would have made sure that he found little opportunity for it. The only meaningful contacts he'd had with boys his age had been to beat them up whenever they crossed into his territory. He'd held them in contempt and they had made it easy, because they were weak, stupid and easy to scare.

But Lee was none of those things and it had never been easy to dismiss him, even though it should have been. Kazuya would never forget the shock of the day when he had first struck out against him with every intention of rearranging his pretty face into a less pleasing shape, only to have that pale, fragile-looking being strike back and strike hard.

Violence was a fact of life in Heihachi's household, but Lee was no stranger to violence and though he was friendly by nature, he was also notoriously easy to provoke. He did not tolerate being bullied and to Kazuya's infinite surprise, he had not gone crying to Heihachi when confronted. Lee fought his own battles and he fought them well, refusing to be intimidated.

The annoying upstart had quickly usurped every inch of his personal space and blown the peace of mind into oblivion. In spite of his obvious hostility, Lee would still trail after him, demanding his attention as if it was something that he was entitled to, to the point where Kazuya had been the one who was forced into retreat, in an attempt to escape him. He'd tried ignoring him, but that had not deterred the little nuisance at all. Even though he had refused to even so much as acknowledge his presence for weeks, Lee had still followed him around with an unceasing stream of chatter in his native tongue, until Kazuya was forced to talk to him, if for no other reason than to have him learn Japanese, because he'd figured that being pestered in a language that he could understand was better than having to put up with it in one that he didn't speak.

By that first spring they had spent together as brothers, Lee had wormed his way into his life so completely, that every part of his daily activities had been permeated by him. Slowly, Kazuya had gotten so used to his presence that he'd begun to enjoy it, instead of merely tolerating it, and day by day, he'd taken Lee to all of his secret places, showing him his hidden treasures that the adults around him did not understand.

There were the rare volumes of manga that he'd kept hidden under a loosened plank in his bedroom floor, which the pest had coerced him into reading for him, because he'd never gone to school before he'd come to Heihachi's house and therefore hadn't learnt to read for himself. Kazuya had shown him his first collection of sneakers and the brat had laughed at it, but he'd still bothered to save up his pocket money and buy him a pair of Nikes for his birthday, which had been the only gift that Kazuya had gotten that year. Then there were the paths through the hidden labyrinths of caves lurking behind the Mishima estate, where they would play hide and seek for hours on end, and the dark grottos where he'd kept his expansive collections of garbled stones and animal skulls.

He remembered the cool, hidden pool of clear water where he'd taught Lee to swim on one hot, wonderful day, even though his initial plan for taking him there had been to drown him. He still didn't know why he'd changed his mind, but he smiled when he remembered Lee's angry face and the dark, narrow eyes flashing under his slender, lowered brows.

"_Kazuya, you jerk!"_ he'd sputtered at him, kneeling there, all wet and shivering, but strangely unafraid, as if the thought that Kazuya would actually do him harm had never even occurred to him, in spite of all the evidence he'd given him of the contrary. _"I couldn't breathe under there!"_

And that had been the final blow to Kazuya's resistance. This brother that he had never wanted had witnessed his true nature, and though he'd been threatened by it directly, he had not been afraid.

Too late, Kazuya had discovered that Lee's unfaltering devotion was an addictive, intoxicating thing. There would be no going back to the way things were before, because Lee was the companion that fate had intended for him and even though the little traitor had eventually renounced their bond and turned his back on everything they had built, Kazuya still believed in that. This terrible longing that he was infused with was like a disease and he felt that he would die if he couldn't have him.

The Devil within him growled and reared its ugly head, but Kazuya pushed it down. It would not do to lose control again and spoil all the hard work that had brought him this far, when he was so close to achieving his goals. It was only a matter of days now, before he had Lee back by his side and this time, he would never let him go. Once they were reunited, he would have all the time in the world to be angry at the brother who had walked out on him, after he had promised that he would never leave. An eternity to reclaim the body of the lover who had betrayed him with other people and put a distance of twenty years between them.

There was so much to make up for. Lee should always have been his and his alone, because regardless of the ambiguous family ties, Kazuya did not doubt for a second that Lee belonged with him, by his side and in his bed.


	16. Consequences VI

Title: Ultimate Hate 16/??

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Part 16

Kazuya knew that he should have put Lee in his place right from the very start. He should have followed his instincts and laid claim to him as a lover, before he'd had the chance to experience lust with other people.

They did not even share blood and he felt like an idiot for letting some fake scruples deter him, because the ultimate outcome had always been so obvious. All that he had managed to achieve with his restraint was to postpone the inevitable and let everything get so complicated! He was certain that if he had really been related to Lee, none of this would've even been an issue. If Heihachi had truly fathered them both; if his brother had looked like him, smelled like him and felt like him, then he was sure that he wouldn't have known this terrible attraction, because how could he ever long for something that reminded him of himself?

He'd fought his desires for too long, letting Lee drift away, while he'd sought from others what he didn't dare ask of him, because there was no denying the bond of brotherhood, regardless of how badly Kazuya had wanted it to be void. They shared a parent, they shared a childhood, and he hated Heihachi for doing this to them. Things should have been so easy, so clear, yet they weren't.

Kazuya wanted everything from Lee. One was not supposed to feel such things for brothers, but how could he help himself? Lee was too much. He had always meant too much and it did not help that when Kazuya had first realised that his need for his brother was turning into something very carnal, Lee had still been so little, which had only served to confuse him further.

At the time when he'd cut all his ties to his childhood, Lee had still been drinking a glass of milk before he went to sleep. He'd been stealing cookies from the kitchen and blaming it on him. He'd been into action figures, trading cards, video games and a thousand other little things that had annoyed Kazuya to no end, because they'd never held any appeal for him.

Lee certainly couldn't have handled what he'd wanted from him then and Kazuya had hated him for making him wait until he was older, until he was ready, because he'd known that his brother had already lost his innocence long before he had come to him.

Kazuya had seen the darkness in his eyes. He'd felt that if he was to show him what he truly was, Lee would understand, but he still hadn't dared to risk it. In spite of his brother's insidious strength, Kazuya had sensed that there was something very fragile about him, which was best left undisturbed. He'd never openly revealed the Devil to him, because he'd been afraid that Lee would break if he did and that he would lose him forever. The evil had raged at not being acknowledged and he'd tried, he had really tried to protect Lee from it, but instead of containing his second nature, he'd been forced to settle with concealing it, because the Devil hated to be denied.

Of all the things, all the moments they had shared as children, one day in particular still stood out in his memory. When he closed his eyes, he could almost see the cold, white morning in the middle of January, thirty five years ago. He was only days away from fourteen and Lee had just barely turned twelve. Both of them were still in school, only Kazuya had not been on his way to class. The Devil within him was roaring and tearing at his insides- torturing him with needs, images and ideas, until finally, he'd been forced to run from the one person whose company he'd craved the most, fearing what he would do, if given the opportunity. The dark side of his being had bared its cravings and he was already exploring the twisted pathways of sin. He was tainted, inside and out, but the more he'd tried to give to his inner hunger, the more it had wanted, becoming harder and harder to contain.

Lee was following him and he could hear the boy calling as he struggled to catch up with his angry sides.

"_Kazuya!" _he yelled and the fresh snow crunched under his light feet. "_Kazuya!"_

He turned with a glare and hated himself when wide, trusting eyes looked straight up at him. Lee was wearing white gloves, a white scarf and a dirty backpack filled with schoolbooks that hung loosely on his shoulder. Snowflakes tangled in his shiny hair and his soft, pretty cheeks were very red from the cold and exertion. He looked delicate, all dressed up in warm, puffy white, and Kazuya was afraid that if he was to touch him, he would melt under his fingertips, like a wisp of snow.

"_What do you want, Chaolan?"_ he said gruffly, hoping that it would make him go away.

"_Kazuya, I've been calling for you!"_ Lee accused, struggling to catch his breath. A white cloud of mist formed around his petulant mouth when he spoke and Kazuya felt his gut tighten in need. _"Why didn't you stop?"_

"_Why would I?"_ Kazuya glared down at him, striving to look intimidating.

Surprised by his coldness, the boy scowled, showing no intention of going away. _"Because I want to come with you!"_

"_No." _Kazuya said simply, in a voice that he thought would discourage all discussion, but Lee planted his feet firmly and exercised his infuriating stubbornness.

"_Why?"_

Why? There were a thousand reasons, none of which Kazuya could own up to. _"Because you are a nuisance and a pest, and I don't want you around!"_

A sharp intake of breath was all the shock that Lee allowed himself to show, before a sly look came over his sweet, round face.

"_I'll tell father that you skipped school, if you don't take me!" _he said smugly, but Kazuya sneered and continued walking.

"_Go ahead, tell,"_ he said, calling his bluff and Lee's bright eyes narrowed.

"_Aww, come on, Kaz!" _he complained, running after him when he showed no sign of giving in._ "I want to go!"_

Lee was a constant torment and trapped as they were in the same house, there was no escaping him. He would leave chocolate fingerprints all over Kazuya's things. He would wear his clothes and leave his scent clinging all over them. The nightmares from whatever hell had spawned him would haunt him at night and he would come to his room in tears, looking for comfort. His closeness would leave Kazuya aching for hours afterwards, long after the brat skipped off in pursuit of other interests.

"_Kazuya!" _Lee begged. _"Slow down, I can't keep up!" _

Frustrated and angry, Kazuya stopped abruptly and turned.

"_What is it with you, you little pest?" _he hissed, easily reaching the end of his unremarkable patience. Unable to slow down in time, Lee crashed straight into his chest. _"What the hell do you want from me?"_

"_I don't want anything," _Lee blinked, baffled by his rejection.

"_Then why do you keep bugging me? Why won't you go away?"_

Lee laughed and pressed up close, before Kazuya managed to gather himself and push him away. His small, gloved hands wrapped around his arm and he shivered against him, seeking the heat of his body. Kazuya's blood had always run hotter than that of other people and Lee could never be warm enough.

"_Because, you are my brother, Kaz!" _he said simply._ "I will never go away!"_

He would never go away.

In a desperate attempt to stop himself from howling, Kazuya ground his teeth, waiting for the anger to pass. It was a lie. Lee had lied when he'd said it, but Kazuya had believed him and he was going to hold him to his word, regardless of the current circumstances, because Lee was the one who had promised him an eternity first!

A polite cough caught his attention, breaking the spell of reminiscence and dragging him back into the real world. Begrudgingly, Kazuya opened his eyes and squinted through the sunlight at the unwelcome presence, but he already knew who it was, because he recognised the man's scent and the sound of his soft, careful footfalls.

Naturally, it was that annoying human who sneaked around, sticking his nose in all aspects of his business, only to look back at him with judging, horrified eyes. He had his arms full of files and seemed to be expecting his attention. Kazuya would kill him. Yes, he would kill him, just as soon as he got his brother back and had the time to worry about breaking in his replacement.

"What do you want?" he said nastily, raising himself up on to his elbows.

This is the preliminary contract for the merger with Violet Systems, Sir," Senn said, handing the file over over. "I need you to look it over. Tonight, if possible."

Scowling, Kazuya took it from him and leafed through the papers inside. The merger contract. Yes, that was important, but he was still unreasonably angry to have had his solitude interrupted. He breathed in deeply in an attempt to compose himself. It was only a matter of time now, after all, before he had Lee in this very room, in person, to spend time his with, instead of just a mere memory to keep him company.

"Anything else?" he asked curtly, but Senn was unmoved.

"Yes, sir," he said calmly. "We need to go over what I am going to say at the conference tonight."

"Now?" Kazuya glared. He wondered if he should kill him anyway, just to make himself feel better.

"Yes, now," Senn insisted. "The conference has to happen before the evening news. If we do not give a statement before then, the media will run rampant with speculation and the damage garnered by such negative publicity will be that much harder to contain."

He was right, of course. Kazuya knew that he was right, but that did not soothe his temper at all. Senn was smart, loyal and efficient. He cleaned up nicely after him, managing against all odds to balance the company's clean, public image with its much darker reality, but Kazuya still found his presence deeply disturbing, especially because it was so hard, so demeaning to own up to the real reason why he did not want him around.

Senn reminded him of Lee.

Kazuya was not quite sure why this was, because there was very little in common between them at the first glance. Both of them were capable, even though Lee was a whole league above him in cunning and in intelligence, and Kazuya supposed that Senn was pretty to look at too, if he could be bothered to see past his general dislike and observe him objectively. But that was where all resemblance stopped.

His eyes narrowed as he studied him with deliberate scrutiny, looking carefully for any lines that would invoke his brother's face, but he found none. Senn's hair was dark and cut short. His face was too narrow and sharp, and the build of his body too fragile and thin. Even his character, his personality offered no likeness whatsoever. Lee was strong, stubborn and defiant, while this one was utterly pathetic in his submissiveness, to the point where Kazuya enjoyed tormenting him, just to see if he could produce a reaction. But that was a good thing, he supposed, for he would have killed him long ago, if he had given him attitude, because there were things that he tolerated only from Lee.

Yet in spite of all this, there was still something disturbingly similar in how they both approached him personally. It was why Kazuya had picked him in the first place, keeping him close for so long, regardless of how painful it had been to endure. Lee also used to deal with him in the same sly, covert and contriving manner; tiptoeing around all his intentions and then attempting to coerce him to doing things differently.

Only, Lee was much, much more successful at manipulating him then Senn could ever be. Much, much more welcome to try, because Kazuya wanted his brother next to him, as the public face of all his ambitions. He wanted Lee trailing him all day and nagging him about all the simple, everyday stuff that he did his best to avoid. He wanted Lee by his side and not this... this stranger, this intruder, who was usurping a position that he could never fill. Kazuya wanted him gone, because Senn was a constant reminder of what he had lost.

"Let's go to my office," he grumbled, getting up from the mattress. "It's too noisy in here for talk."

He stalked out through the door, pushing past the workmen, who were fitting in the security system, but Senn hesitated, looking back.

"What is it now?" Kazuya scowled and Senn collected himself quickly.

"I... I am sorry, sir," he said, catching up, but he couldn't look away from elaborate, electronic locks being manoeuvred into place. "But isn't he... isn't he putting that lock on the wrong side of the door?"

"The wrong side?" Kazuya looked back with him. "What do you mean?"

"Well, he is installing the control pads on the outside."

"That is the correct side, Mr. Secretary," Kazuya said.

"But... but that would mean that once it is locked, the door can't be opened from the inside of the room!" Senn said incredulously.

"Yes, Mr. Secretary," Kazuya said blandly, humouring him. "That would actually be the point!"


	17. Familiar Faces I

Title: Ultimate Hate 17/?

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Overall incest, language, angst, with special accent on explicit violence in this chapter.

Part 17

The phone buzzed.

"Yes, Mr. Andersen?"

"The general is here to see you, Mr. Lee," the voice from the other side informed him over the static.

"Very good, I've been expecting him." Very eagerly, in fact, even though he nearly dreaded what he would have to say. "Send him in immediately."

Lee swivelled in his massive, leather chair, then got up and walked around to stand in front of the neat, shiny desk; waiting for his visitor. In the wake of the chaos that had befallen him during the past week, he'd had the presence of mind only for basics and hair-care products had not been very high on his list of priorities. Colouring his hair purple took time that he did not have, but the bright silver had to be disguised, so he wrapped a silk scarf over his head, tying it in a pirate-style knot at the nape of his neck. It was hardly professional, but it served its purpose. The rest of his outfit was no better. He wore pure, casual white: tight, low-cut jeans and a cotton shirt that opened on his chest, leaving a vast portion of tanned skin bare, but it was too late to change. He was too impatient for the information the general was carrying to leave him waiting because of something that trivial, especially since the man was not someone who ranked as particularly important in his calculations to warrant keeping up appearances.

Heavy footsteps outside of his door alerted him to imminent company and he had time to arrange his face into a pleasant, empty expression that he'd become very accustomed to wearing when dealing with people, like a mask. He knew what he looked like: for most part, he was a picture of reckless, informal youth, but his gaze always belied his true age and as such, it had to be concealed. He reached for his dark sunglasses and put them on.

Keeping his thoughts hidden had become natural to him, but it was always difficult to stop his eyes from betraying his true state of mind, especially during troubled times like these, when all his fears and emotions came to the surface. They had always been far too old for his face, even when his looks had matched his true years, but now they were downright dangerous. Sometimes, when he stood in front of the mirror, the darkness of what he saw there frightened even him.

The door opened loudly and with sudden force. Obviously, the general was not accustomed to knocking and Lee consciously suppressed his irritation at having his territory so rudely invaded without granted permission, even though he had already been alerted to his coming and knew from previous experience what to expect. Andersen hurried behind their guest, intending to show him to the office and to perform the obligatory introductions, but none of this turned out to be necessary. Lee and the general knew each other well enough already and the moment he stepped inside and laid his eyes on Lee's half-covered face, his expression changed from intent focus, to unpleasant surprise and finally, to sheer, undisguised rage.

"You, again!" he bellowed in fury. The general was a tall, heavily muscled man dressed in mottled green and high, leather boots. His lined, ill-tempered face and heavily greying hair betrayed him to be in his mid-fifties, even though his powerful figure showed little sign of age. He towered over Lee by a whole foot in height and looked down at him with contempt.

"It is a pleasure to see you too, General," Lee smiled pleasantly up at him, standing his ground and refusing to back down when his visitor walked straight into his personal space and stood looming over him, with only centimetres of distance between them.

"Um... do you need anything else, sir?" Andersen asked cautiously from the door, alarmed by the unfriendly note the meeting had taken off on. His hand was already on the buzz, ready to call in the security at a second's notice.

"No, thank you, Mr. Andersen," Lee replied smoothly. "You may go. And close the door behind you. I do not want to be disturbed."

"Yes, sir," Andersen said reluctantly, but he did as he was told and shut the door, leaving behind a thick silence that was static with hostility.

"I wasn't expecting you, Mr..." the general said with forced politeness, pointedly making a show of not remembering the name Lee had been introduced to him by during their previous encounter.

"Violet," Lee smiled for him sweetly, but his voice was laced with ice. "Just Violet."

"Whatever," the general returned the smile, but it looked vicious rather than friendly on his face. "Listen carefully, you smug, two-faced opportunist! I did not come all this way simply to waste my time with you."

"I assure you, General," Lee said, "wasting time is nobody's intention. In times like these, even seconds are precious, so if you would please..."

"I want to speak to someone in charge!"

"I am in charge," Lee said smoothly, his smile not faltering for an instant.

"This investigation was conducted under specific instructions from Mr. Lee himself," the general said. "I was under the impression that I would be speaking to him. I will not convey our findings to anyone else."

"Mr. Lee is indisposed. But you can rest assured that anything you share with me will be reported to him personally with the utmost accuracy. You have my word that whatever you say here will be just as if you had spoken to him."

"Perhaps I am not making myself clear, you bureaucratic pest," the general said. "I came here to speak to Lee, not one of his lapdogs."

"It is becoming very hard for me to pretend that you aren't going out of your way to insult me, General," Lee replied, feeling his irritation crawling to dangerous levels, testing the limits of his control. "Are you not aware of what my position in this company is?"

"I don't give a damn what your position is!" the general snarled. "Just like I don't care who put you there and for what reasons!" Contemptuously, he took Lee in from head to toe and made it very clear what he thought the nature of his relationship with the elusive head of the corporation was, which amused his host to no end. "I am not in the mood for games. Your president has been hiding for too long and I am no longer willing to run errands for a man who does not have the decency to meet me in person, after my men risked their lives to do his bidding!

"Is that your final word on the matter?" Lee said coldly.

"It is," the general replied, failing to take note of the warning in his voice. "I face fire and steel day after day, year after year, so that the likes of you can grow fat on the spoils of war, therefore you had better run along and tell your boss to get his crippled arse up from his cushy, corporate chair, and come down to speak to me face to face like a man, if he still is one! I will be waiting."

Lee's eyes narrowed behind his dark shades. He hated thugs and this man was one of them: stupid, rude and full of himself. He was too tired, too stressed, too anxious to stand there and take insults from a narrow minded, short-sighted fool and this was the last straw.

"Mr. Lee does not come and go at the demand of the likes of you," he said. "Your sense of self-importance is overinflated, General, and I would suggest that you start showing some manners and courtesy, before this meeting turns unpleasant! The fact is that I own you! It is me standing between you and a certain death. It is my weapons, my technology, deciding between your victory and defeat! You live and you die at my command, so do not tempt me to show you just how disposable you are! "

"Why you little...!" the general turned red with rage. It was all a matter of seconds, but years of training had given Lee the ability to perceive threat as fast as lightning and a sheer, infallible instinct to react.

Lee knew the general's move before the man himself had consciously become aware of what he was about to do. It was clear from the intake of his breath, the flaring of his nostrils and the shifting of his impressive, superior weight. Lee possessed a speed that was hard for the eye to follow. The angry fist aimed towards him had barely even begun its upward swing when he struck out like a viper; swift, strong and precise. It was no more than a jab of his fingertips on the general's shoulder, but it hit the pressure point with concentrated force, making the massive body twist back involuntarily, away from the source of the pain. The general growled and tried to straighten himself, but Lee struck again, slamming his fist into his solar plexus and knocking the air out of him.

The general was a mountain of a man and next to him, Lee's proportions seemed almost childlike, but the giant doubled over and toppled at his feet, gasping. His eyes bulged and strained while he struggled to breathe, clutching his stomach to contain the pain.

Very calmly, Lee walked around him as he recovered, showing no sign of physical strain. He reached into his pocket and casually lit a cigarette. Enraged, the general started to rise and Lee smiled pleasantly, looking down with smug contempt.

"Give it up or you are going to get hurt," he said and like a maddened beast, the general roared, charging at him with all the force of his injured pride, but for all his raw strength, the sheer mass of his body rendered him too slow and his uncontrolled anger made him blind. Lee easily stepped out of the way of his initial punch and the general splayed past him. He manoeuvred clumsily, spinning to strike his evasive target again, but Lee easily hit the back of his elbow and the tendon relaxed, allowing him to bend his arm in the wrong direction. The joint snapped and the general howled in agony, dropping to his knees like a felled tree. Lee twisted the broken arm, causing spectacular pain. The man screamed and doubled over. Lee bent his knee and pressed it to the small of his back, forcing submission.

Involuntarily, the general's body convulsed in torment, but it did not take a lot of strength to hold him in place now. He sweated profusely, gasping for breath. His eyes rolled back in his head and the rapidly blinking eyelids opened and closed only over the bloodshot whites. He panted and Lee leaned down low over him, to breathe his words directly into his ear.

"I would hate to explain to your superiors why I had to put you down like the rabid animal that you are," he said evenly. "Do you think you can collect yourself for long enough, so that we can at least attempt to talk in a civilised manner?"

"Yes... Yes!" the general gasped desperately. The front of his pants was wet and urine pooled beneath him on the immaculate, lacquered floor.

Lee's nostrils widened as they picked up the vile stench of defecation. "Good," he purred in satisfaction. "Now, tell me what I need to know."

"In... in my left pocket...!" The reply was almost voiceless, because he was was in too much pain for his constricted throat to form a sound. Lee reached down calmly and retrieved a memory stick.

"Thank you, General," he said, letting him crumple down on to the floor. He walked back to his desk and fell sideways into his big chair, crossing his long legs over its padded arms. He turned on the computer and waited impatiently for the data to load. The overwhelming anxiety found its outlet in a barely visible tremor of his slender hand and Lee clenched it into a fist as he focused on the screen, angry at such a show of weakness. The images flashing before him were anything but reassuring.

"Well, at least, my satellites work," he said cheerfully and the general looked up incredulously. He was pale and bathed in sweat. He cradled his broken arm to his chest and barely clung to his restraint to stop himself from howling, while this man who had humiliated him so thoroughly only moments ago, now sat there easily, smoking, without even a strand out of place on his immaculate, white clothes.

"The signal was able to break through their ray shields effectively and take these pictures," he replied, his voice hoarse and rasping. "They are quite clear."

Clear, indeed. Lee gazed upon the images of the huge complex with growing horror. Hundreds of armoured battle vehicles and armed aircrafts. Harboured war ships large enough to house an entire city. Dark patches of people appearing as small as ants that sprawled in neat, endless formations. A standing army numbering in hundreds of thousands. "Looks like G-Corp. has not been entirely honest with is," he mused. "Which makes one wonder what else they have to hide!"

Lee marvelled at the sheer size of the corporation. It was a country within a country; vast, powerful and organised. He was filled with a mix of envy and boundless curiosity at the sheer genius of technology that had kept something this big hidden and disguised for so long! It had taken him years to come up with programs and machines advanced enough to break through their codes and sneak a peek so deep within their territory.

The results were frightening. The place was huge beyond his wildest imagination. He zoomed in, watching in wonder as a whole, secret world unfolded in front of him. Roads, dams and infrastructure. An endless potential in power and energy.

It would take him weeks to go through this footage in detail and try and figure out what he was dealing with here, but he did not have weeks! The merger with G-Corporation loomed perilously close and Lee realised with dismay that he may not have enough time to find a way out of this. He had a huge amount of stock wrapped up in this monstrous enterprise. More wealth than he could even put into numbers! Secret research shared with their labs to potentially be used against him in more ways than he could even begin to contemplate! Even more disturbingly, due to recent events, G- Corporation had gotten its hands on several of his most valued scientists and engineers. He went cold from the thought of what could be done to them in that place. More importantly, he worried about what whoever was in charge of this could learn about him now, because this confirmed his initial fear that none of them were dead like it had been reported.

He had only himself to blame for this. He should have known better than to have dealings with Japan, after he had so narrowly escaped from it once. Suspicions formed of their own accord and the faces of the family he had cut his ties with long ago suddenly resurfaced to the forefront of his mind. He was being lured back into their hell and the reasons for it eluded him, but he realised that he had nearly walked into the trap unsuspecting.

"What are you?" he murmured, afraid of not knowing what he was facing. "Who are you?"

He skimmed through the close-ups of the ground shots. A whole series of images captured the motions of a regiment in training. There were hundreds of armed and armoured men there, wearing the insignia of G-Corporation's military force. Lee nearly closed the folder in a quest for more pressing, more relevant data when the tall, dark figure of a yelling commander caught his eye.

This man was no Asian. He was big, black and foreign. Judging from his bearing and the attitude he was clearly projecting even on to a still picture, Lee immediately guessed American. He was facing away from the camera, but there was still something so familiar about the way that he carried himself that Lee was certain that he would... if he could just...

He frowned and clicked on to the next image which showed him turned sideways, with his profile clearly revealed. Lee's eyes widened under his dark glasses and he breathed in sharply. He knew that face! The man seemed larger, heavier than he remembered. He was older, harder and more menacing, but there could be no doubt that it was the same person.

"Irvin," Lee breathed out the name he'd once thought he would never have the need to speak out aloud again, but it seemed that he'd been wrong. About a lot of things.


	18. Familiar Faces II

Title: Ultimate Hate 18/?

Fandom: Tekken

Pairing : Kazuya/Lee

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst.

Part 18

Lee turned his face towards the sky and screamed, because the roof offered him the solitude to rage. The wind whipped around him and the scarf on his head came undone, setting the mass of his silver hair loose.

It had been so long since he'd heard of Bruce Irvin. True, he'd had no reason to think about him for many, many years, but right now, in this context, his sudden appearance was of great consequence. His presence invoked another name— a name that Lee did not dare to formulate even in his thoughts, let alone speak out aloud, for the fear of summoning his closeness.

But it was too late already. His mind overflowed with images of _him_, bringing with them emotions that threatened to rip him apart between anger, longing and pain. He closed his eyes in an effort to block the ever-clear memory of Kazuya's face, but with the real world shut out, the darkness only made it clearer. "No!" he gasped the desperate denial. "No, it can't be!" Yet it was and he knew it, even though he still had no substantial proof to confirm his terrible doubts. His treacherous heart beat wildly in a rhythm that seemed to invoke the syllables of his brother's name and Lee fell to his knees, screaming again when tears stung the corners of his eyes.

It was a fact that Kazuya had outsmarted him.

This new, secret and monstrous aspect of G- Corporation had his signature all over it. It was his logic, his nature, and Lee cursed himself for not seeing it sooner. He had become lazy and content—and he had completely missed it under the insidiously orchestrated stealth. Kazuya was a creature of mayhem and war, but it seemed like time had taught him patience. The web G- Corporation had woven around Violet Systems reached years back and the brother he remembered would never have been able to sit back quietly and wait for his prey to come to him instead of chasing it down. Kazuya took what he wanted when he wanted it, not caring what bridges he burned in the process. It was this lack of self- control that had caused his downfall the first time around, but it seemed like he would not be making the same mistake twice. He had grown, he had learned, he had mastered himself. Lee almost did not recognise the man he'd once known in this new menace, but it was him and there was no doubt about it. Only Kazuya would have been able to lure him so cunningly, with exactly the things he loved, until he was irresistibly drawn back to him. Only he would have known how to use just the right kind of bait and carefully lower his usual caution, making him blind to the threat he would have easily perceived under other circumstances. It was Kazuya, because only he would have known how to hide and how to deceive him until he got what he wanted.

And Lee was certain of what Kazuya wanted.

G-Corporation was a military enterprise and obviously, the new, advanced weaponry was what they were after. They guessed, even if they didn't know what Violet Systems was working on. The successful completion of Lee's latest project would have given the army in possession of such devastating technology a horrifying advantage and this cunningly planned merger would've opened the doors of Violet System's manufacture wide, supplying Kazuya with the tools for mass destruction that were unparalleled in recorded history! Standing there and looking back from this new perspective, Lee didn't understand how he could have been that careless, allowing Kazuya to come so close. How could he have not noticed the trap closing in around him?

Of course, that was the reason why his brother had chosen not to reveal himself sooner and Lee saw that clearly now. It was why he had allowed him to continue thinking that he was dead, mocking nearly two decades of his grief, because he would have known that Lee would burn his company down to the ground— with all the people, the research and the technology within it— rather than let it fall into his hands. If Lee had so much as suspected that Kazuya was still at large in Japan, he would never have even attempted business with the country, let alone allowed it to go this far. The only thing he had speaking in his defence was the sure knowledge that, when he'd started his collaboration with G- Corporation, the pain over Kazuya's supposed death had still been vivid and vast. He couldn't have possibly known. He'd nearly lost his mind because of it, while the evil bastard had sat back— alive and well— playing with him like a cat with a mouse, using him to further his apocalyptic goals.

"_I see why Kazuya still loves you,"_ Jinpachi had said. _"Without you, he would be alone for all eternity!" _

Lee laughed out loud, the bitter venom escaping in the midst of his hate. As if Kazuya had ever wanted, or needed company! Love, indeed! What a joke, to think that he too had once believed himself loved by such a being! He had always known that Kazuya was heartless and cruel, but he had always clung on to the illusion that for him, he was different. Lee could never have imagined a more staggering, more comprehensive defeat than knowing that Kazuya still lived. After everything that he'd done— helped him, covered for him— after all the written and unwritten laws of both morals and society that he had broken for his sake, after everything that he had forgiven and all that he had given up on, after all the sacred values that he had walked all over and sacrificed— _this_ was what he was being given in return!

Their relationship had never been easy, but Lee had endured it for years— swallowing the pain and humiliation out of some misguided notion that, in spite all of the constant attempts to make his life miserable, Kazuya still loved him in the best way that such a creature could love. He had settled for what he could get, because being recognised in any way at all by his deranged foster family had seemed so very important at the time, for reasons that he could no longer remember underneath all the carnage they had left in his soul. He had always thought that Kazuya's feelings for him were complicated and he had accepted that, because Kazuya was a complicated being. Now he understood that his motives and emotions were, in fact, very simple. Kazuya had never loved him. He had hated, and Lee was only beginning to understand how much. There had never been a time when Kazuya had not revelled in causing him pain.

"_But you will not have it your way, my brother," _he vowed and clenched his fist. _"It takes two to play this game!"_

The heavy, steel door groaned behind him. "Mr. Lee!" Andersen called from the top of the stairs, squinting and blinking against the vicious wind. Lee spun around in anger, not wishing to be seen by anyone while he was like this—so raw, exposed and totally lacking his composure.

"Did I not say to you that I do not wish to be disturbed?" he asked vehemently and Andersen took a step back, lifting his hands up, with the palms facing outwards in an instinctive placating motion.

"Yes, sir!" he said quickly. "And I would not have bothered you if it wasn't important, but we really need you to come down at once!"

Lee's eyes narrowed. "What happened?"

"Tech Surveillance has detected an unauthorised entry to our data files," Andersen said. "The code managed to bypass our security and we failed to catch it before it gained access. At this point, we don't know how long the intruder spent inside our systems and what information he uncovered. We caught him only when he tried to transfer the data on to an outside port, which was what set off the alarms in the first place."

"Him?" Lee raised an eyebrow. He remained calm, watching his subordinate squirm as he tried to judge his mood and failed.

"We have... ah, captured him in person," he said. "The reason he'd managed to bypass the code shields in the first place, was because he was doing it from inside, and I mean literally from inside of the building! From the central Data Division computer, no less!"

"That was a spectacularly stupid risk to take," Lee said, somewhat surprised. "He couldn't have possibly expected to get away with it! Who is he working for?"

"We don't know," Andersen said. "He chose to remain silent when questioned."

Lee smiled coldly. "Well, that is unlikely to last for long," he said and Andersen did not need to ask him what he meant.

"Uh, sir..." he said, shifting uncomfortably. "That could be a problem."

"Problem? Why?"

"We confiscated his ID," Andersen said and Lee's eyes widened.

"ID?" he exclaimed. "He had his ID on him?"

"And a badge."

"Badge?"

"Hong Kong Police Force."

"Hong Kong Police... Fucking hell," Lee swore, suspicion— and recognition— dawning.

"Which is why we didn't dare apply any... drastic measures," Andersen added hurriedly, apparently mistaking Lee's sudden irritation for concern. "We wouldn't want to cause an international incident... unless the situation warrants one, of course."

"International incident, indeed," Lee hissed in contempt and stalked past him. "Of all the obstinate, incompetent, single-minded... Oh, he'll talk, alright! How he got in, who he is working with, what he knows and who else is in on it! Even though the answer to all of them is probably 'nothing' and 'no one important', I am going to enjoy every minute of making him speak!"

Anger consumed him—an old anger that he'd forgotten had even been there. Coupled with the disastrous news he'd already received, it resurfaced—vivid and clear, as if time had turned backwards and taken him right to the source of his resentment. He strode into the elevator and pressed down, watching dispassionately as it slid closed, while Andersen, still in shock from witnessing his reaction, scrambled to catch up with him.

The descent was nearly soundless, with only the faintest buzz humming in the background. Lee welcomed the silence, because the noise in his head was rising to an almost unbearable crescendo of chaos. He had a weird sense of déjà-vu. Things were repeating themselves— same situations with the same characters, even though the time, place and the circumstances were significantly different. The recollections made him nauseous. Unpleasant memories crawled out, bringing with them things that he had left behind and conveniently forgotten.

He pushed them down again and cleared his head with effort, intent to focus upon the crisis at hand. There was no use in dwelling on the past. It was a mantra that had served him well for as long as he could remember, because his mistakes and failures were so profound, he was sure that lingering upon them in any depth could only lead to disaster. If he thought about everything that went wrong in his life and allowed himself to fixate upon it, he'd go insane. He'd already gone down that road once and the consequences had been so devastating that the shock of the aftermath still remained fresh in mind, keeping him focused, though he was feeling the cracks in his self control widen with every new blow.

"_Calm,"_ he told himself. _"Keep calm."_ He had to think if he was going to find a way out of this disaster. Working himself up into a full-blown panic attack wasn't going to bring him any closer to a solution, but gods above, it was becoming harder and harder to remain cool, to remain objective, when he thought about who it was he was working against—

He firmly stepped down on to that train of thought and breathed deeply; consciously making the tense coils of meshed, twisted emotions uncurl before they suffocated him. He walked down the wide, spacious corridor and the stern, uniformed security stood back from the heavily guarded door, letting him pass. The head administrator of the division hurried to brief him in on the situation, but Lee wasn't listening. An assortment of odd objects removed from someone's pockets lay on the table. Money—colourful bills and loose change that did not amount to much in value. Cheap cigarettes and an unremarkable lighter keeping them company. Receipts, tickets, candy wrappings and a half-finished box of green mints. Lee picked up the badge and scanned over the information in the ID. It was a formal inspection—he already knew what he would find.

Lei Wulong, age 48. Current residence, Hong Kong— where he should have bloody well stayed put and kept his nose out of business that was too big for him to handle, but Lee supposed that some people never learn.

A worn wallet of scarred, faded leather lay open and a mournful pile of small photographs that had been removed from it now sat on the desk, carelessly displayed by its side. All of them showed people that Lee did not recognise at the first glance—all but one, which was obviously far older than the rest and partly concealed under the more recent ones, with just a yellowish, ragged corner showing. Despite a sudden chill of premonition, Lee reached out anyway and drew it out into the light. The serene, beautiful face hit him like a blow and he pulled his hand back abruptly, as if he had been burned.

Jun Kazama.

Funny how time had done nothing to soothe the memory of her. She looked young in the picture, younger than he remembered her, which meant that it had been taken some years before she'd walked into his life and triggered the chaos that had followed. There were cherry blossoms in her wind-swept hair and she was laughing; innocent, happy and carefree. So very, very, very different from the woman she'd become by the time he'd last met with her.

Just seeing her face again was all it took and Lee felt himself unravel.

She was still an open wound. He had lived with it for so long, he'd become accustomed to it and almost managed to convince himself that it wasn't there, but he couldn't ignoring it now. All of it flooded back—deep, raw and pulsing—until he found himself struggling to breathe. Appalled by how helpless he still was in the face of that old, deep-rooted despair, he took a step back and forced himself to look away. He clenched his fists until nails bit into his palms. He was desperate for the focus brought on by the brief pain, but all his careful resolutions, which had seemed so firm only moments ago, were crashing down around him.

"Where is the intruder?" he asked and his voice sounded hoarse to his own ears, but the people in the room with him didn't seem to notice anything wrong. Of course, they wouldn't know what to look for. They couldn't know what all of this meant.

"This way, sir," the head of security lead him to the other side and a big screen flared to life under his touch. "We are temporarily holding him in section G, office 1125, until we decide what to do with him. It will not do as a long-term holding cell, but it is secure enough for the time being. As you know, we have no detention levels in this complex and consequently, no necessary equipment, so it would be a good idea to transfer him somewhere significantly more... secure for interrogation."

The impromptu cell had been stripped of all furniture, except for a desk and a single chair. Lei sat with his back straight and his handcuffed hands were laid out calmly in front of him. His face sported new, swelling welts which would turn into a spectacular rainbow of bruises within hours, but his expression remained dignified and solemn in spite of the obvious beating he'd received. Lee sneered in disdain. Of course, the idiot would think it a good idea to take on trained, professional security armed with stun guns and shock sticks, in an attempt to fight his way out of a mess that his own stupidity had gotten him into with nothing but bare fists. Lee loathed his oblivious courage. He despised him for his lack of common sense and the privilege to not think through the possible repercussions of his ridiculous actions.

This was not the first time Lei Wulong had stuck his nose too deep into his business. If there was one thing that Lee hated, it was the useless, incompetent police messing around and wasting his precious time. The detective had interfered in his life on one too many occasions and it was high time that he faced the full consequences of that.


	19. Familiar Faces III

Title: Ultimate Hate- Familiar Faces III

Fandom: Tekken

Pairings : Kazuya/Lee, implied Kazuya/Jun and Lei/Jun

Disclaimer: I do not own Tekken or any of its characters. I am not making any profit from this.

Rating: R

Note: Sorry for the hiatus, people, RL happened.

Warnings: Incest, violence, language, angst, a little bit of torture.

Part 19

A steel-lined boot struck him in the ribs and Lei woke up to the shock crushing pain. He choked on the stench of stale air and blinked helplessly against the darkness. There was not an inch of him that didn't hurt and he groaned, recalling the chain of his recent misfortunes.

_Mishima. Mishima. Mishima._ The name blared through his mind like a red howl of alarm.

He'd been caught trying to break into the main computer at the Violet Systems headquarters. He'd been detained, blindfolded and bound. He'd been vaguely aware of twisting corridors and humming elevators as they led him down to the restricted, decaying levels; deep under the clean, air-conditioned corporate floors.

There, they interrogated him.

_Who are you? Who sent you? What were you looking for?_

He'd been beaten when he'd refused to answer and then interrogated some more. Punished when he'd taunted, cursed and refused to tell. Hours upon hours of cruelty, violence and pain. He must have passed out eventually, because from a certain point, his recollections turned from hazy to non-existent. The situation wasn't promising, but he'd known the dangers before he'd embarked upon this madness. He'd known that if he was caught, there was a chance he would not be returning alive.

"Get up, you rat!" a harsh voice ordered.

The kick was repeated and reflexively, Lei tried to kick back, but lying in the dark, with his hands cuffed behind him, his mobility was severely compromised. He fell, hitting the floor with a grunt. His head struck the concrete, magnifying the disorientation. Unable to control wave of nausea, he coughed up a stream of bile that was threaded through by slivers of red.

"Are you ready to talk yet?"

Questions. There had been so many questions followed by such agony.

Lei sneered at him. "You are going have to do a lot better than this before you get anything out of me!" His words were brave, but after the long torment, his voice was broken and hoarse. The butt of a weapon slammed into his jaw and he fell back. With effort, he raised himself again, in spite of the pain and spat out blood.

"Oh, you can count on that!" It was a promise, and Lei cursed as he strained to see through the haze of the low, artificial light. His vision blurred, but he managed to discern the dim figures: there were two of them, dressed in black, with carbon masks over their faces and heavy, complicated guns in their hands. He got kicked once more as punishment for the scrutiny. "Get up. The boss wants a little word with you."

_The boss. _Lei knew only too well what he'd come there to find, but he still couldn't suppress a shudder of trepidation at the possibility of his greatest fear being confirmed.

Had the monster he was after left its lair and crossed the ocean in anticipation of the merger with the company that the Mishima Zaibatsu had lost decades ago? And if it had, did Lei merit high enough on Kazuya's nuisance scale for him to reveal himself over this? His sense of self-importance whispered _yes_, which tickled his ego nicely, but a more sober part of his reasoning said _no_. Kazuya had spent too much effort on hiding his tracks to be that careless now, on his account, which brought on yet another disconcerting thought—if the demon did indeed show his face, it would only be so that he could kill him in person and that would be a slow and terrible death.

Rough hands forced him to his feet when it didn't look like he would manage on his own and pushed him forward. A suffocating bag of cloth was pulled over his head, blinding him. He stumbled, forced to move at a pace that he wasn't capable of. Deprived of sight, he blundered through the darkness, struggling for clear thought. His other senses flared to full alert in a futile race for information.

His nose picked up the dank, oppressive blanket of stale air that spoke of deep, unventilated underground halls and the nauseating stench of rot and decomposition. Through it all, he could still smell the hard cold of reinforced concrete which held the construction together so deep under in the earth. It was old— the foundations predating the splendid body of Lee's skyscraper by many decades, maybe even by a whole a century. They were built to endure and as such, they had survived even the last of the great wars— still standing, long after the collapse of the structure they were originally meant to uphold. His feet sloshed through a shallow film of stinking water and in the midst of the deep, dense silence that was broken only by his breathing and the heavy march of booted feet, he could hear the steady, insidious drip from the rusting pipes.

Finally, they stopped. Without warning, he was struck behind the knees with the barrel of a gun and his legs gave out under him. The muzzle hit his spine and he cried out as the pain forced him to double over. Gasping, he stayed where he was, kneeling in the dark and fighting to regain control over his composure.

"It's been a long time, Detective," a voice like velvet drifted through the darkness. Seductive and beguiling, it permeated the hollow chill with its warmth and a sense of dread coiled in Lei's belly. He knew that voice— in the middle of America, it was speaking fluent Cantonese, but the accent was off, as if the tongue had not used it for many years.

They ripped his blindfold off and Lei flinched. Though it was dim, the frugal lighting still hurt after the long, undisturbed darkness and for many long moments, he could see nothing. He blinked in the general direction of where he'd been addressed from and through the blur, he saw a figure dressed in white. It was a man, sitting on his heels several feet above him, balanced on the edge of a platform like a graceful cat— easy, languorous and surrounded by a sense of latent danger. Two large, heavily built security guards stood on his either side and they were dressed in suits rather than in armour, with dark shades over their eyes and their fingers resting on the triggers of big guns. Lei could not see a face. Thick shadow covered it like a veil, but then the head tilted in mock curiosity and a ray from a flashlight broke on silver hair. He gasped in recognition.

"You!" he exclaimed.

"You seem surprised!" Lee said and in spite of himself, Lei still felt the words worming their way under his skin, because the voice was irresistible— deep, low and lingering. "Who did you expect to find, sneaking under my roof?"

Lee was right, of course, and Lei kicked himself inwardly for letting his confusion show. Careless. He'd been so careless, dismissing Lee in the midst of the empire that he'd built himself and which publically still carried his name, except—

"You're supposed to be dead!" he said, still staring stupidly, unable to make sense of his presence.

Lee laughed. "That is what I call sloppy research, Detective! But then again, I expected no better from you."

"I read your medical records!" Lei cried. "I _saw_ the originals with my own eyes!"

"Hn." Lee sounded amused. "You should know better than to trust official documentation by now."

"I should, indeed." Lei replied bitterly. "It was too good to be true. Your entire family is like a weed and there is no reason why you'd be different. Careless of me to discount you, when it stands to reason that you'd still be the one doing Kazuya's dirty work!"

Lee flinched at the mention of Kazuya's name and the silence that followed was long, thick and dangerous. Slowly, he got to his feet. With a stern motion of his hand, he ordered his guards back and then jumped down, landing almost soundlessly in a crouch in the shadows underneath.

"Kazuya?" Lee asked, raising himself to his full height. The question was formed with careful friendliness and it wildly contrasted the hostile stance of his body. "Why would you mention Kazuya's name?"

It was Lei's turn to laugh. He couldn't help himself, even though the mirth came to him at a high cost. "Your secret is out!" he cried, ignoring the common sense that whispered it was not wise to antagonise a sociopath who did not need additional reasons to be pissed off with him. "I _know_ that it is Kazuya running the G- Corporation!"

"You know?" Lee said. "And how do you know that?"

Lei was not fooled by his causal tone. Lee was too eager, too alert underneath the smooth cover and he could not— or quite possibly, couldn't be bothered— to fully hide his immense need to know.

"Previous experience tells me that finding one of you at the core of something very wrong means that the other one cannot be far away!" he sneered. "I've seen the mayhem G- Corporation has caused. I've known that it was evil for a long time, but it was the war with the Zaibatsu that first made me suspect him! I set out to prove it and now that I find you here, on the verge of the merger with that monstrosity, I no longer have any doubts! Kazuya is fuelling a world war to further yet another evil agenda, and you are giving him with the tools to do it! Even after all this time, you are still providing cover for his misdeeds! It's so nice to see that some things never change!"

A moment of silence went by as Lee studied him from the shadows and suddenly, Lei felt very uncomfortable. He couldn't see his eyes, only the deep darkness where he knew that the eyes should be and this made him feel threatened, as if he was facing something strange and unreal. Lee reached into his pocket and for a moment, Lei could not discern what he was doing, but then he realised it was nothing more sinister than retrieving a pack of cigarettes and putting one to his lips. A brief flicker of flame partially lit up his face and Lei's heart skipped a beat. The sense of wrong swelled and left him feeling disoriented. He peered forward with effort, trying to grasp at what felt like an illusion and Lee breathed out a wisp of smoke that threaded its way between the sparse lines of illumination, alternating between revealing itself and hiding in the dark.

"True, some things do not," Lee said coolly. "I, for one, see that you are still as inept a detective as ever! Guessing makes poor police work. You have no idea what you are talking about, or who you are going up against. You are working blindly, putting both yourself and others at risk with your recklessness. I fail to see how giving your life to prove a point to people who don't give a damn about whether you live or die constitutes as brave. But then again, the line between martyrs and fools had always been thin."

"I am not suicidal, nor am I trying to be a martyr!" Lei said indignantly. "I am standing up for what I know is right! It is my privilege and my duty to fight against your kind, even if all that I can hope for is death!"

"Hn," Lee's words took on a distinct note of speculation. "Your stupidity never ceases to amaze me. There had been a time when I'd thought that all this posing, self-righteousness and badly fitted ideals had been because of _her_, but now I am not so sure_."_

"Don't go there!" Lei growled.

"I'd always assumed that she was the one you were trying to convince of your courage," Lee went on undeterred, "as if pitting yourself against your betters would somehow increase your own worth."

"Don't you speak of her!" Lei cried angrily, the old wounds hurting. "You have no right! Do you hear me? You have no right!"

"But even now that she is long gone, you are still playing your old game, so I have to wonder, what is it that you are trying to prove?" Lee mused and though he could not see it, Lei could hear the snicker in his voice.

"I am not trying to prove anything, damn you!"

"Do you think that a lifetime of putting yourself at heedless risk can make up for the fact that you failed her the only time it mattered? That dragging out a fight long-settled in the favour of your opponents can somehow still redeem you?"

"Shut up! Just... shut up!"

"Face it! You lost it all a very long time ago," Lee mocked. "The fight. The tournament. The woman you desired. You should give up already, there is no point, unless..."

Roaring with rage, Lei lunged forward at him, not caring that he was outnumbered, overpowered and bound. He saw only red and he wanted blood, but the retribution came swiftly and the pain was intense. He could hear Lee laughing as he doubled over from the blows of the security, choking on his own blood.

He got up with effort when they stopped and saw Lee draw in a long drag of smoke, turning briefly, and for a moment, his profile was exposed under the white, artificial light.

"Unless, of course, it is yourself that you are trying to impress? Is it possible that you really are that vain?"

Lei started in shock, because he couldn't possibly have seen that right. "You don't know me and don't you dare pretend that you do!" he ground out over the agony of having to speak, desperate for another look at him.

"Let's put that to the test, shall we?" Lee said. "After all, I have better things to do with my time than waste it here with you, so I will give you the chance to spare me a lot of hassle and yourself a lot of pain." In an easy, graceful move, he stepped fully out of the shadows and Lei gasped.

He stared. He blinked, shook his head and then stared again, not quite believing what he saw.

Lee looked good, too good. He had always been beautiful, but this was simply wrong. Lei had seen people age well—hell, he'd been told on more than one occasion that he _was_ one of those people—but this was so much more than just that. It was more than good fortune, good maintenance and good genetics. It seemed as if Lee had not aged _at all _and that was not natural. The face in front of him was much, much younger than he knew it to be. Though he hadn't seen him in nearly two decades, he looked completely _unchanged_.

With growing horror, Lei remembered that even before his supposed death, he had been physically unblemished, in spite of a destructive lifestyle. The drugs, the drinking, the corruption and stress had left no trace on him and he'd remained flawless, all the way up to the accident that had mangled more than just the car he'd been driving. Even two decades ago, his enduring beauty had been a cause for much envy and speculation, but at the time, it had not yet begun to stretch the limits of what was possible.

Lei was certain that something sinister lurked behind it. Something monstrous, immoral and threatening, because he knew who Lee was and more importantly, he suspected what he was capable of. He was afraid to guess what atrocities he could have committed, what laws of nature and human ethics he'd violated to attain this... this perfect, aberrant youth.

"Fuck you!" he spat in disgust, instinctively backing away from the obscenity Lee's presence implied.

"Ah, I only wish!" Lee gave an exaggerated sigh. "Unfortunately, I have the likes of you lurking around and causing trouble, which leaves me with no time for such pleasant activities. But since you seemed to be so concerned about the state of my sex life, please do help me get it back on track! I cannot even begin to explain how mutually beneficial your cooperation would be! If you tell me who gave you the access codes to my company— a name, a lead, anything that I can work with— and if I make it out of here tonight with enough time to actually get fucked, I may be inclined to let you go with the full function of all your limbs still intact. And believe me when I say this; that is a lot more generous than what you've got coming from me right now."

"I will tell you nothing!" Lei glared and Lee's mouth curved into a cold, frightening smile.

"Why am I not surprised?" he said. He turned and beckoned to his men. "Bring him! Let him see for himself what I do to spies in my company. He is long overdue a lesson about the real meaning of pain."


End file.
